ecognizing something in the voice or
else guided by instinct.

"Joanna!" he exclaimed, holding up a lamp above her. "You, Joanna!"

At the name, Rosemary McClean came running out--looked for an
instant--and then knelt by the old woman.

"Father, bring some water, please, quickly!"

The missionary went in search of a water-jar, and Rosemary McClean bent
down above the ancient, shrivelled, sorry-looking mummy of a woman--drew
the wrinkled head into her lap--stroked the drawn face--and wept over
her. The spent, age-weakened, dried-out widow had fainted; there was no
wakened self-consciousness of black and white to interfere. This was a
friend--one lone friend of her own sex amid all the waste of smouldering
hate--some one surely to be wept over and made much of and caressed.
The poor old hag recovered consciousness with her head pillowed on a
European lap, and Duncan McClean--no stickler for convention and no
believer in a line too tightly drawn--saw fit to remonstrate as he laid
the jar of water down beside them.

"Why," she answered, looking up at him, "father, I'd have kissed a dog
that got lost and came back again like this!"

They picked her up between them, after they had let her drink, and
carried her between them to the long, low sitting-room, where she told
them--after considerable make-believe of being more spent than she
really was--after about a tenth "sip" at the brandy flask and when
another had been laughingly refused--all about Ali Partab and what his
orders to her were.

"I wonder what it all can mean?" McClean sat back and tried to summarize
his experiences of months and fit them into what Joanna said.

"What does that mean?" asked his daughter, leaning forward. She was
staring at Joanna's forearm and from that to a dull-red patch on the
woman's loin-cloth. Joanna answered nothing.

"Are you wounded, Joanna? Are you sure? That's blood! Look here,
father!"

He agreed that it was blood. It was dry and it came off her forearm in
little flakes when he rubbed it. But not a word could they coax out
of Joanna to explain it, until Rosemary--drawing the old woman to
her--espied the handle of her knife projecting by an inch above the
waist-fold of her cloth. Too late Joanna tried to hide it. Rosemary held
her and drew it out. Beyond any shadow of a doubt, there was blood on
the blade still, and on the wooden hilt, and caked in the clumsy joint
between the hilt and blade.

"'Joanna--have you killed any