a length in the line,
And,--God let him boast that I serve him!

THE dawn was barely breaking yet when things stirred in the little
mission house. The flea-bitten gray pony was saddled by a sleepy saice,
and brought round from his open-sided thatch stable in the rear. The
violet and mauve, that precede the aching yellow glare of day were
fading; a coppersmith began his everlasting bong-bong-bong, apparently
reverberating from every direction; the last, almost indetectable, warm
whiff of night wind moved and died away, and the monkeys in the near-by
baobab chattered it a requiem. Almost on the stroke of sunrise Rosemary
McClean stepped out--settled her sun-helmet, with a moue above the
chin-strap that was wasted on flat-bosomed, black grandmotherdom and
sulky groom--and mounted.

She needed no help. The pony stood as though he knew that the hot wind
would soon dry the life out of him; and, though dark rings beneath dark
eyes betrayed the work of heat and sleepless worry on a girl who should
have graced the cool, sweet, rain-swept hills of Scotland, she had
spirit left yet and an unspent store of youth. The saice seemed more
weathered than the twenty-year-old girl, for he limped back into the
smelly shelter of the servants' quarters to cook his breakfast and
mumble about dogs and sahibs who prefer the sun.

She looked shrunk inside the riding-habit--not shrivelled, for she sat
too straight, but as though the cotton jacket had been made for a larger
woman. If she seemed tired, and if a stranger might have guessed that
her head ached until the chestnut curls were too heavy for it, she was
still supple. And, as she whipped the pony into an unwilling trot and
old mission-named Joanna broke into a jog behind, revolt--no longer
impatience, or discontent, or sorrow, but reckless rebellion--rode with
her.

It was there, plain for the world to see, in the firm lines of a little
Puritan mouth, in the angle of a high-held chin in the set of a gallant
little pair of shoulders. The pony felt it, and leaned forward to a
canter. Joanna scented, smelt, or sensed in some manner known to Eastern
old age, that purpose was afoot; this was to be no early-morning canter,
merely out and home again; there was no time, now, for the customary
tricks of corner-cutting and rest-snatching under eaves; she tucked her
head down and jogged forward in the dust, more like a dog than ever. It
was a dog's silent, striving determination to b