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KRISHNAVANA
119

Hindu was saying, over and over again, on his way back to his lodgings. It was a queer exclamation, and it ran:

"I pray God that there is a hell … for the sake of mine enemies, for the peace of my soul."

Couzens should also have considered that the wise man guards against the vengeance of an elephant, a cobra and a Hindu. But Couzens was not a wise man. Also, what does a monkey know of the taste of ginger?

It was not really Couzens's complexional prejudice which infuriated Krishnavana: for if the White does not like the Brown from an esthetic point of view, the Brown replies in the flowery language of the Orient that fairer even than the white is the leper.

Krishnavana was chiefly outraged because Couzens had made gentle remarks about family, mésalliance, suitable marriage, and similar fetishes.

Now the Englishman was the descendant of a knight who had crossed the Channel with William the Conqueror in comparatively recent times … a matter of eight hundred years or so ago … while Krishnavana's father was a Tomara of Delhi, claiming kinship with the flame, and his mother a