The guards laughed and turned their backs with added insolence. In that second Joanna shot like a black spirit of the night straight past the missionary's legs and collapsed in a bundle on the floor behind him.
“Shut the door, sahib!” she hissed at him. “Quick! Shut the door!”
He shut it and bolted it, half recognizing something in the voice or else guided by instinct.
“Joanna!” he exclaimed, holding up a lamp above her. “You, Joanna!”
At the name, Rosemary McClean came running out—looked for an instant—and then knelt by the old woman.
“Father, bring some water, please, quickly!”
The missionary went in search of a water-jar, and Rosemary McClean bent down above the ancient, shrivelled, sorry-looking mummy of a woman—drew the wrinkled head into her lap—stroked the drawn face—and wept over her. The spent, age-weakened, dried-out widow had fainted; there was no wakened self-consciousness of black and white to interfere. This was a friend—one lone friend of her own sex amid all the waste of smouldering hate—some one surely to be wept over and made much of and caressed. The poor old hag recovered consciousness with her head pillowed on a European lap, and Duncan McClean—no stickler for convention and no believer in a line too tightly drawn—saw fit to remonstrate as he laid the jar of water down beside them.
“Why,” she answered, looking up at him, “father, I'd have kissed a dog that got lost and came back again like this!”
They picked her up between them, after they had let her drink, and carried her between them to the long, low sitting-room, where she told them—after considerable make-believe of being more spent than she really was—after about a tenth “sip” at the brandy flask and when another had been laughingly refused—all about Ali Partab and what his orders to her were.
“I wonder what it all can mean?” McClean sat back and tried to summarize his experiences of months and fit them into what Joanna said.