“Tut, tut, tut! Hang the girl! why didn’t she run to someone else? It’s a pity she doesn’t wake, though, for a cup of coffee would do her good.
“Humph! Yes, she’s a very handsome girl,” muttered the doctor, thoughtfully. “What a pity it is that they can’t leave their pretty white teeth alone, instead of disfiguring them like that, and—Bless me—how strange! Where have I seen this girl before?”
He stood gazing down at her very thoughtfully, but his memory did not serve him.
“It must have been at the Inche Maida’s, and that makes it worse, for we don’t want to offend her—Ah! that’s right,” he said aloud in Malayan.
“How do you feel?”
For answer the girl, who had just opened a pair of large lustrous eyes, gazed at the doctor at first in a frightened way, and then caught his hand in hers, kissed it passionately, and held it to her breast.
“Oh, come, I say, my dear, this won’t do!” cried the doctor. “What the dickens do you think Mrs Bolter would say if she saw it? There’d be the prettiest row under the sun. Now, then, be calm, and lie still. You shall have a cup of coffee, and then I’ll extract some of the thorns from your feet, or you’ll be regularly crippled.”
There was a fresh burst of sobbing here, the girl striving to speak, but her sobs choked her utterance.
“There, there, there,” said the doctor, kindly, “don’t cry, my poor child; you are safe now, and I’ll take you back to the station in spite of Harley and Mrs Bolter herself. Hang the slave customs and all who practise them, I say! Now, my dear,” he added, in Malayan, “loose my hand and I will get you some coffee.”
He tried to withdraw his hand, but the girl clung to it the more tightly.