Ali Partab could not have understood the words, but he may have caught their meaning, for he glanced sideways at the old hag mumbling in the shadow and grinned into his beard.

"Are you in communication with him?
Could you get a letter to him ?" "I have no slightest notion where he is, sahib." "If my letters could once reach him, wherever he might be, I would feel confident of their arriving at their destination." "I, too, sahib!" "I sent one letter--to a government official.

It cannot have reached him, for there should have been an answer and none has come.

It had reference to this terrible suttee business.

Suttee is against the law as well as against all dictates of reason and humanity; yet the Hindoos make a constant practice of it here under our very eyes.