The next moment, her woman's instinct prompting her, she sprang forward; and it was she who caught the stricken mother as she fell.
CHAPTER XXIV
THE CREED OF A FIGHTER
It was growing very hot in the plains. A faint breeze born at sunset had died away long ago, leaving a wonderful, breathless stillness behind. The man who sat at work on his verandah with his shirt-sleeves turned up above his elbows sighed heavily from time to time as if he felt some oppression in the atmosphere. He was quite a young man, fair-skinned and clean-shaven, with an almost pathetically boyish look about him, a wistful expression as of one whose youth still endured though the zest thereof was denied to him. His eyes were weary and bloodshot, but he worked on steadily, indefatigably, never raising them from the paper under his hand.
Even when a step sounded in the room behind him, he scarcely looked up. "One moment, old chap!" He was still working rapidly as he spoke. "I've a toughish bit to get through. I'll talk to you in a minute."
There was no immediate reply. A man's figure, dressed in white linen, with one arm quite invisible under the coat, stood halting for a moment in the doorway, then moved out and slowly approached the table at which the other sat.
The lamplight, gleaming upwards, revealed a yellow face of many wrinkles, and curious, glancing eyes that shone like fireflies in the gloom.
He stopped beside the man who worked. "All right," he said. "Finish what you are doing."
In the silence that followed he seemed to watch the hand that moved over the paper with an absorbing interest. The instant it rested he spoke.
"Done?"