"Did he want you to turn her out?"
"No, he said so long as she behaved herself he couldn't ask me to do that. He said he wanted to be just to me. I promised she shouldn't have no more visitors. I've just been and told her."
"How did she take it?"
"She gave me Hell."
The trader squirmed in his old ducks. He had found Miss Thompson a rough customer.
"Oh, well, I daresay she'll get out. I don't suppose she wants to stay here if she can't have anyone in."
"There's nowhere she can go, only a native house, and no native'll take her now, not now that the missionaries have got their knife in her."
Dr Macphail looked at the falling rain.
"Well, I don't suppose it's any good waiting for it to clear up."
In the evening when they sat in the parlour Davidson talked to them of his early days at college. He had had no means and had worked his way through by doing odd jobs during the vacations. There was silence downstairs. Miss Thompson was sitting in her little room alone. But suddenly the gramophone began to play. She had set it on in defiance, to cheat her loneliness, but there was no one to sing, and it had a melancholy note. It was like a cry for help. Davidson took no notice. He was in the middle of a long anecdote and without change of expression went on. The gramophone continued. Miss Thompson put on one reel after another. It looked as though the silence of the night were getting on her nerves. It was breathless and sultry. When the Macphails went to bed they could not sleep. They lay side by side with their eyes wide open, listening to the cruel singing of the mosquitoes outside their curtain.