She did not stop again until they had cantered up through the awakening bazaar, where unclean-looking merchants and their underlings rinsed out their teeth noisily above the gutters, and the pariah dogs had started nosing in among the muck for things unthinkable to eat.  The sun had shortened up the shadows and begun to beat down through the gaps; the advance-guard of the shrivelling hot wind had raised foul dust eddies, and the city was ahum when she halted at last beside the big brick arch of the caravansary, where Mahommed Gunga’s boots and spurs had caught her eye once.

“Now, Joanna!” She leaned back from the saddle and spoke low, but with a certain thrill.  “Go in there, find me Mahommed Gunga-sahib’s man, and bring him out here!”

“And if he will not come?” The old woman seemed half-afraid to enter.

“Go in, and don’t come out without him—­unless you want to see me go in by myself!”

The old woman looked at her piercingly with eyes that gleamed from amid a bunch of wrinkles, then motioned with a skinny arm in the direction of an awning where shade was to be had from the dangerous early sun-rays.  She made no move to enter through the arch until her mistress had taken shelter.

Fifteen minutes later she emerged with Ali Partab, who looked sleepy, but still more ashamed of his unmilitary dishabille.  Rosemary McClean glanced left and right—­forgot about the awning and the custom which decrees aloofness—­ignored the old woman’s waving arm and Ali Partab’s frown, and rode toward him eagerly.

“Did Mahommed Gunga-sahib leave you here with any orders relative to me?” she asked.

The Rajput bowed.

“Before he went away, he spoke to me of safety, and told me he would leave a link between me and men whom I may trust.”

The Rajput bowed again.  Neither of them saw an elbow laid on the window-ledge of a room above the arch; it disappeared, and very gingerly a bared black head replaced it.  Then the head too disappeared.

The girl’s eyes sparkled as the reassurance came that at least one good fighting man was waiting to do nothing but assist her.  For the moment she threw caution to the winds and remembered nothing but her plight and her father’s stubbornness.

“My father will not come away, but—­”

Ali Partab’s eyes betrayed no trace of concern.

“But—­I thought—­Are you all alone?”

“All alone, Miss-sahib, but your servant.”

“Oh!  I thought—­perhaps that”—­she checked herself, then rushed the words out as though ashamed of them—­“that, if you had men to help you, you might carry him away against his will!  Where are these others who are to be trusted?”

Ali Partab grinned and then drew himself up with a movement of polite dissent.  It was not for him to question the suggestions of a Miss-sahib; he conveyed that much with an inimitable air.  But it was his business to keep strictly to the letter of his orders.