And the men of the village who were clustered round the shelter agreed, as though nothing could be more natural:
“Yes, she is the Englishwoman.”
“And what do the words mean?”
The old woman shrugged her shoulders.
“My father used them just as I did,” she said. She spoke with a certain pride in the possession of those five uncomprehended words. “He learned them from his father. I do not know what they mean.”
It was mystifying enough to Arden that, in a country where hardly a Moor of a foreign tribe, and certainly no Europeans, had ever been known to penetrate, there should be a Frenchwoman who knew no French, and an Englishwoman with five words of English she did not understand.
But there was more than this to startle Arden. He had heard those same words spoken once before, by a Moorish boy who had declared himself to be an Englishman, and that Moorish boy had murdered his friend Challoner.
Arden glanced carelessly at the youth who stood by the old woman’s side.
“That is your son?” said he.
“Yes. That is Dimoussi.”