“But what did you do?” asked Dora.

“I sat down on a stone and thought how I could get even with that crowd.”  She bit her lip and her soft brown eyes hardened.

[Illustration:  Where the lonely figure in black and white sat brooding.]

“And that’s where we came in, don’t you see?” interposed Jaffery hastily.

You can imagine the scene.  The two Englishmen, one gigantic, red and hairy, the other wiry and hawk-like, jogging up the mountain path on ragged ponies and suddenly emerging onto that plateau of despair where the lonely figure in black and white sat brooding.

Under such unusual conditions, it was not difficult to form acquaintance.  She told her story to the two horror-stricken men.  British instinct cried out for justice.  They would take her straight to the Vali or whatever authority ruled in the wild land, so that punishment should be inflicted on the murderers.  But she laughed at them.  It would take an army to dislodge her enemies from their mountain fastnesses.  And who could send an army but the Sultan, a most unlikely person to trouble his head over the massacre of a few Christians?  As for a local government, the mallisori, the mountain tribes, did not acknowledge any.  The Englishmen swore softly.  Liosha nodded her head and agreed with them.  What was to be done?  The Englishmen, alter giving her food and drink which she seemed to need, offered their escort to a place where she could find relations or friends.  Again she laughed scornfully.

“All my relations lie there”—­she pointed to the smoking ruins.  “And I have no friends.  And as for your escorting me—­why I guess it would be much more use my escorting you.”

“And where would you escort us?”

“God knows,” she said.

Whereupon they realised that she was alone in the wide world, homeless and penniless, and that for a time, at least, they were responsible to God and man for this picturesque Albanian damsel who spoke the English of the stockyards of Chicago.  Again what was to be done?  They could take her back to Scutari, whence they had come, in the hope of finding a Roman Catholic sisterhood.  The proposal evoked but lukewarm enthusiasm.  Liosha being convinced that they would turn her into a nun—­the last avocation in the world she desired to adopt.  Her simple idea was to go out to America, like her father, return with many bags of gold and devote her life to the linked sweetness of a gradual extermination of her enemies.  When asked how she would manage to amass the gold she replied that she would work in the packing-houses like her mother.  But how, they asked, would she get the money to take her to Chicago?  “It must come from you!” she said.  And the men looked at each other, feeling mean dogs in not having offered to settle her there themselves.  Then, being a young woman of an apparently practical mind, she asked them what they were doing in Albania.  They explained.  They were travellers from England, wandering for pleasure through the Balkans.  They had come from Scutari, as far as they could, in a motor-car.  Liosha had never heard of a motor-car.  They described it as a kind of little railway-engine that didn’t need rails to run upon.  At the foot of the mountains they had left it at a village inn and bought the ragged ponies.  They were just going ahead exploring.