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 be there when the finish came—­a dog’s disregard of all object or objective but his master’s—­but a long-thrown stride, and a crafty, beady eye that promised more usefulness than a dog’s when called on.

The first word spoken was when Rosemary drew rein a little more than half-way along the palace wall.

“Are you tired yet, Joanna?”

“Uh-uh!” the woman answered, shaking her head violently and pointing at the sun that mounted every minute higher.  The argument was obvious; in less than twenty minutes the whole horizon would be shimmering again like shaken plates of brass; wherever the other end might be, a rest would be better there than here!  Her mistress nodded, and rode on again, faster yet; she had learned long ago that Joanna could show a dusty pair of heels to almost anything that ran, and she had never yet known distance tire her; it had been the thought of distance and speed combined that made her pause and ask.