"Where is the memsahib? Quick, tell me, quick!"
The watchman, ashamed at having been caught asleep and thinking it nothing strange that a girl should call the doctor in the night, hastened to show Shama Sahai the stairs leading to the roof of the bungalow.
"You'll find her up there. She always sleeps on the roof in the hot weather."
The girl was soon beside the doctor's cot and with frightened sobs was telling her story. "I've come to you and you must save me," were her final words.
Events happen quickly sometimes, especially when an energetic woman is helping them along. As the earliest morning train pulled out from Kamadabad for Mattera, a native Christian woman with a Hindu girl, disguised in the slightly different garb of a Christian, was on board, and the white doctor-memsahib was taking her chota hazri with fear in her heart.
What would be the fate of the poor young girl who had fled to her for refuge? That was the question which was troubling the doctor that morning. Although she was used to witnessing crises in people's lives with real, professional calm, this morning her outward calmness was assumed, for this was a case which her degree of M. D. had, perhaps, not qualified her to handle.
Throughout the long day the doctor waited expecting searchers for the girl, but no one came to make any inquiries of her. As she was leaving her compound gate towards evening for her daily exercise, she met a man and a woman, the latter carrying on her hip a baby whom the doctor recognized. The man was saying in Hindustani to the woman:
"The priest stole her. I know he stole her! Well, it's much the same after all, I suppose, for we're rid of her anyway. Of course he pretended he had not seen her and was angry because I had not brought her. Well, well; it's hard to deal with the priests."
"Whoever has her, may bad luck go with her!" exclaimed the woman.