'The moon is just going down and you ought to be sleeping,' he said. 'And remember there is my tale still to tell.'
So we went to the Church. We had one candle between us there. Moreover, the purple lamp was burning, its quaint cup of wire-gauze averted doom from many self-immolant flies. We knelt beneath it, and he said the Prayers of the Shrine, then our own prayers followed then he began to tell:
'I was coming back from England twenty months ago and I chose to come by the East Coast. It is a beautiful way to come. I saw Zanzibar, where there are many hopes and memories. I slept two nights far out of the city there, in a grove of palm trees. Then the boat came back from the mainland and I went aboard again.
'We started for a four days' voyage or so, to Beira. She came aboard at Zanzibar, I think. Some one told me this, when I asked about her afterwards. But I was never really conscious of her presence till the second night of our voyaging. Then we met at a Concert in the Third Class, that I had strolled down the deck to patronize. To my shame I was traveling second, while she was in the crowded family of the third. I went and spoke to her.
'A child had had a bad fall from some steps, and she was mothering him. It was a lovely and pleasant thing to see how she did it.
'He should wake up without much pain,' she said, with a smile, at last. She handed the boy to his own admiring mother. Then she turned to me, for I had been asking after him.
'She began to talk about our common work. "I want to climb on a new boat at Chinde, and go the way of the Lakes," she said.
'Are you going to teach?' I asked.
'"I hope I may teach at whiles," she said, "But I am sent first of all to heal."
'She told me about her hopes for her work.