“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 one?”

Joanna shook her head.

“Tell me the truth, Joanna.  Whose blood is that?”

“A dog’s, Miss-sahib.  A street dog attacked me as I ran hither.”

“I wish I could believe it!”

“I too!” said her father, and he took Joanna to one side and cross-examined her.  But he could get no admission from her—­nothing but the same statement, with added details each time he made her tell it, that she had killed a dog.

They fed her, and she ate like a hyena.  No caste prejudices or forbidden foods troubled her; she ate whatever came her way, Hindoo food, or Mohammedan, or Christian,—­and reached for more—­and finished, as hyenas finish, by breaking bones to get the marrow out.  At midnight they left her, curled dogwise on a mat in the hall, to sleep; and at dawn, when they came to wake her, she was gone again—­ gone utterly, without a trace or sign of explanation.  The doors, both front and back, were locked.