"Were you not sorry then that you had not told me?" urged her mistress.
"No, Memsahib, not even then, for it was better that Old Sarah should die all alone than that the memsahib and the dear, orphan children should die too."
"You precious old woman!" The memsahib, sinking on her knees by the bed with her arms around the thin, brown shoulders, implanted a kiss upon the gray hair. "That is more than a white person would have done!" she said under her breath.
And as the English woman looked upon Old Sarah's happy face and remembered the happy, trustful face of the young girl who had saved this life and declared that the old woman would live because of prayer, the memsahib realized that no hearts in the world were whiter before God than those of these brown people who loved Him well enough to be willing to lay down their lives for others. In beauty of form and feature these brown people often surpass the white races and she felt that with the love of the true God in their hearts they might surpass the white races, also, in the beauty of their lives and of their love.
IV
A Son of the Law
On an afternoon in the early days of the British occupancy of India, Blackmore-Sahib sat alone at the big desk in his study, in his hand a report which had just reached him from one of his districts. At his elbow the tea tray was untouched, although at this hour of the afternoon he was usually stretched out in a rattan chair in the living-room with the punkah swinging over him, the latest magazine, three months old at that, in his hand, and the tea tray already replaced on the small table beside his chair by the cigar service holding cigarettes all neatly rolled ready for his match. It was not because the report was urgent that he had forsaken his accustomed ease to prove it up; nor was it that he was particularly interested in the task, for apparently he was forcing himself to go over the lines of type and up and down the columns of figures. As his pencil reached the bottom of a column it would almost drop from his listless fingers until, with a start, he would begin upon the next row as if in great haste.
The bearer, entering the room noiselessly, saw the untouched tea tray standing just as he had left it a half hour before and looked anxiously at his master's face. But without disturbing his master he removed it and turned to the side table where stood the tobacco service. Not a cigarette was rolled! He clumsily attempted to prepare some but none of his efforts were really successful. However, he put several bulky ones in a saucer and placed them near his master's hand. Still in silence but with many backward glances at the man bending over the slowly-moving pencil, the boy left the room.
As the boy closed the door, the man dropped the pencil upon the desk, put his hand to his head for a second, and then arose. He walked to the door into the living-room and seemed to listen for an instant; then he went back to the desk.