They halted at sundown, and crept under the arches of a bridge over a dry watercourse, and ate raw rice and drank water. It was plain that they must pass the night where they were, and as they were very tired, they were not long in falling asleep. Gyannia, infant-like, slept soundly till dawn, but not so her brother. At midnight he was awoke by a cold, damp nose being poked into his face; he started up trembling, and a few minutes later he heard his visitor’s melancholy cry--it was only a prowling jackal. As he sat and stared into the grey light, his sharpened ears heard another sound that made his heart beat very fast--the “haunk--haunk” of a hyena. The cat, too, sat up and listened. If it came their way, he had no weapon; and stories of children devoured by hyenas were a common topic among the crones of Paroor village. He had several times seen a hyena skulking round, when he was driving home the cow--a hideous, high-shouldered, shuffling brute; but then his father had been near, and he was not afraid. Now, alas! his father was miles away, and he was almost sick with terror. The cry came nearer and nearer--oh, fearfully near--now it was directly overhead! What intense relief! the brute was on the high-road right above them; yes, and the “haunk--haunk” was dying gradually away in the distance; but Girunda slept no more that night. Supposing it should come back? The cat, too, appeared to have anxieties; she did not curl up, but sat bolt erect beside him. She was a queer animal, attached to people and not to a place, though the first day she had followed them in a devious and uncertain manner, uttering low mews of expostulation, and even sitting down in the middle of the road, and thus remonstrating from afar, till they were almost out of sight, but subsequently joining them like a whirlwind, with a long white tail. Lately she had been carried, and had had “lifts” in the bullock-cart and ekka; so the cat was much the freshest of the party, and seemed to have become reconciled to the journey, though she evidently did not approve of sleeping out at night in the neighbourhood of hyenas. It was the end of June, just before the rains broke; the sky was like molten brass, the earth like stone. Who would travel in such a time?--who but two homeless unfortunates, who must press forward or else lie down and perish! Girunda staggered along, carrying his sister, at the rate of three koss a day. The four annas were long exhausted, and they now openly begged their bread! Some gave them a few handsful of rice,--which they ate raw--some a few cowries, which they spent at the little bunnia shops; they could barely keep body and soul together! Yes, they were like the mendicants that had come to their own door in the good times Girunda remembered, when his mother was alive--and the cow.