"And is not this the Chief's hut?"
This was the last word, the full sentence of divorce; she, now a common woman, had no right to stand where she stood. She looked hastily round the compound and then walked silently to the gate and so out.
The man gathered up the ivory bangles and tied them in the shawl. He rolled up the mat upon which Mironda had been sitting and tucked it under his arm. Then, spitting contemptuously on the ground, he followed.
Some years later I saw Mironda, clothed in the rags of a slave woman, begging food at the Mission station.
When the wife of the Chief is divorced, her fall is gradual. For a space she becomes the wife of a head man, who presently passes her on to someone lower in the social scale, and so from hand to hand she passes until she becomes the consort of a slave.
In Mironda's case she first became the wife of Sikoro; surely a no more cruel punishment could have been devised for her.