Just then an agonized whisper reached him from Jeekie.

“Look out!” it said, “here come Asika.  Go sleep and seem better, Major, please, or I catch it hot.”

So Alan almost shut his eyes and lay still.  In another moment she was standing over him and he noticed that her hair was dishevelled and her eyes were red as though with weeping.  She scanned him intently for a little while, then passed round to where Jeekie lay and appeared to pinch his ear so hard that he wriggled and uttered a stifled groan.

“How is your lord, dog?” she whispered.

“Better, O Asika, I think that last medicine do us good, though it make me very sick inside.  Just now he spoke to me and said that he hoped that your heart was not sad because of him and that all this time in his dreams he had seen and thought of nobody but you, O Asika.”

“Did he?” asked that lady, becoming intensely interested.  “Then tell me, dog, why is he ever calling upon one Bar-bar-a?  Surely that is a woman’s name?”

“Yes, O Asika, that is the name of his mother, also of one of his sisters, whom, after you, he loves best of anyone in the whole world.  When you are here he talks of them, but when you are not here he talks of no one but you.  Although he is so sick he remembers white man’s custom, which tells him that it is very wrong to say sweet things to lady’s face till he is quite married to her.  After that they say them always.”

She looked at him suspiciously and muttering, “Here it is otherwise.  For your own sake, man, I trust that you do not lie,” left him, and drawing a stool up beside Alan’s bed, sat herself down and examined him carefully, touching his face and hands with her long thin fingers.  Then noting how white and wasted he was, of a sudden she began to weep, saying between her sobs: 

“Oh! if you should die, Vernoon, I will die also and be born again not as Asika, as I have been for so many generations, but as a white woman that I may be with you.  Only first,” she added, setting her teeth, “I will sacrifice every wizard in this land, for they have brought the sickness on you by their magic, and I will burn Bonsa-town and cast its gods to melt in the flames, and the Mungana with them.  And then amid their ashes I will let out my life,” and again she began to weep very piteously and to call him by endearing names and pray him that he would not die.

Now Alan thought it time to wake up.  He opened his eyes, stared at her vacantly, and asked if it were raining, which indeed it might have been, for her big tears were falling on his face.  She uttered a gasp of joy.

“No, no,” she answered, “the weather is very fine.  It is I—­I who have rained because I thought you die.”  She wiped his forehead with the soft linen of her robe, then went on, “But you will not die; say that you will live, say that you will live for me, Vernoon.”

He looked at her, and feeble though he was, the awfulness of the situation sank into his soul.