"If it doesn't answer you can put an end to the arrangement at once; a day's notice, if you like, will be sufficient. Take him on for a week, and let me hear at the end of it whether the plan is working successfully or not. It will be a great relief to my mind to know that he has employment of some kind, not only as a means of living but also as occupation. Later on I will try to persuade him to leave Chirapore and get work elsewhere. With a testimonial from you he should have no difficulty in finding a situation as schoolmaster in one of our missions. If he will only sever his connection with his family and place himself beyond their influence I see a grand future before him in the mission field. We so rarely win over a man of good caste. At present he clings with all the force of a great love to his family and to his wife and child. Patience! patience! I am a most impatient man, Miss Wenaston," he concluded, turning to her with a boyish laugh that echoed through the verandah. Having discussed the details of Ananda's immediate employment, Alderbury dropped into a thoughtful silence. From a few words spoken casually by the Doctor he was not satisfied that Wenaston appreciated and valued Ananda's conversion as much as he should. Eola's remark earlier in the day also hung in his mind; yet he did not want to preach or to talk shop, as he sometimes called it. His difficulty of finding an opening was solved by a question put by Eola herself in the pause that ensued. "You said this afternoon that I knew nothing about Hinduism. Don't you think you might enlighten me a little? I am open to conviction, and quite ready to believe that the Hindus will be the better for the Christianity you are giving them. Of course idolatry is only fit for savages, and the people of India ought to adopt something better as they are not savages." "You mustn't think that the Hindus are a nation of idolaters. The ignorant masses worship idols and probably believe that the images themselves have some mysterious power of divinity in them; but the educated Hindu will tell you that the idol is symbolical; that they look beyond and through the image to the Deity. Their conception of the Deity is different from ours. He is impersonal and He is the creator of good and evil." "A bold theory of the infinitude of the Deity on one hand and the existence of evil on the other," said Wenaston, who was listening, although Alderbury addressed his remarks to Eola. "The Hindu believes that the world exists for a retributive purpose so that spirits may find embodiment, and suffer pain and joy according to their deserts. Through their sufferings in cycles of rebirths they progress towards their final state of impersonal beatitude. The retributive world with its process is eternal and lasts through all ages. If the world dies, it dies to be born again.