She began to feel, at last, as if it were a nightmare, this necessity that urged her on, she knew not whither. Dimly, her eyes still blinded by dust, she was aware that she had left the main thoroughfares and was now in a poorer part of the town. With the gait of a sleep-walker, she continued on her way, until suddenly a voice addressing her jerked her broad-awake.
"You come see me, missis?"
A woman had opened the door of a mean tin house and stood there waiting in the doorway, almost as if she had been expecting Sophia Ozanne. The latter stood stone-still, but her mind went racing back to a winter afternoon seventeen years before, when she had sat in her bedroom with the little dying form of Rosanne upon her knees, and a voice speaking from the shadow of her bedroom had said, "Missis sell baby to me for a farthing; baby not die." The same voice addressed her now, and the same woman stood in the doorway of the mean house gazing at her with large, mournful eyes. It was Rachel Bangat, the Malay cook.
"You come see me die, missis?" she questioned, in her soft, languorous voice.
"Die! Are you sick, Rachel?" said Mrs. Ozanne.
"Yes, missis; Rachel very sick. Going die in three days."
Sophia Ozanne searched the dark, high-boned face with horror-stricken eyes, but could see no sign of death on it, or any great change after seventeen years, except a more unearthly mournfulness in the mysterious eyes.
But she had often heard it said that Malays possess a prophetic knowledge of the hour and place of their death, and she could well credit Rachel Bangat with this strange faculty.
"How my baby getting along, missis?"
Such yearning tenderness was in the question that Mrs. Ozanne, spite of a deep repugnance to discuss Rosanne with this woman, found herself answering: