She looked back again once, trembling with an overmastering hate, directed less at the priest who grinned back at her than at the loathsome rite he represented.  In two actual words, she cursed him.  It was the first time she had ever cursed anybody in her life, and the wickedness of doing it swept over her as a relief.  She revelled in it.  She was glad she had cursed him.  Her little, light, graceful body that had been quivering grew calm again, and she turned to hurry home with an unexpected sense of having pulled some lever in the mechanism that would bring about results.  She neither knew nor cared what results, nor how they were to happen; she felt that that curse of hers, her first, had landed on the mark!

But she had come further than she thought.  Distance, hot wind, and emotion had exhausted her far more, too, than she had had time to realize.  Before a mile of the homeward journey had been accomplished, she was forced against her stubborn Scots will to sit down on a big stone by the roadside and rest, while the four that followed came up close, grinning and passing remarks in anything but under-tones.  If the meaning of the words escaped her, their gestures left little to be misunderstood.  A crowd of stragglers drew together near the four—­ laughed with them—­took sides in the coarse-worded argument about Jaimihr’s known ambition—­and shamed her into pressing on homeward.

But she was forced to rest again, and then again.  Physical sickness prevented her from obeying instinct, reason, will, that all three urged her on.  No false pride now told her to dare the insolence of the guards; nothing appealed to her but the desire to hurry, hurry, hurry, and do whatever should appear to need doing when she reached the mission house.  She had no plan in her head.  She only knew that she had cursed a man, and that the curse was potent.  But her feet dragged, and her vitality died down.  It was sundown when she reached the mission house, and she could hear the rising, falling, intermittent din of drums before she saw her father in the doorway.

“Father!” She ran to him, and he caught her in his arms to save her from falling headlong.  “Father, there is going to be a suttee tonight!  Hear the drums, father!  Hear the drums!  It’ll be tonight!  That’s to stop the screams from being heard!  Listen to them, father—­two suttees, side by side—­I’ve seen the pyres and the scaffolds—­do they jump into the flames, father, from the scaffolds?—­tell me!  No-don’t tell me—­I won’t listen!  Take me away from here—­away—­ away—­away—­take me away, d’you hear!”

He carried her inside, and laid her on the caned couch in the living-room, looking like a great, big, helpless, gray-haired baby, as any man is prone to do when he has hysteria to deal with in a woman whom he loves.

“I cursed a man, father!  I cursed a man!  I did!  I said ‘Damn you!’ I’m glad!”

“Don’t, little girl—­don’t!  Lassie mine, don’t!  Never mind what you saw or what you said—­be calm now—­there is something we must do; we must act; I have determined we must act.  We must act tonight.  But we can’t do anything with you in this state.”