"Holy Prophet, she is not here! Thou hast not seen her! Then she hath
gone to the _Missen_ to be baptised. Why didst turn her brain with
books? Fool! Idiot!"
"The Mission!" Meer Ahmed Ali was awake now, and the peaceful party,
gathered in the verandah for early tea, stared as the young man burst
in on it with imperious demands for his wife. Then his surroundings
recalled his acquired courtesy, and he stammered an apologetic
explanation.
"She has gone away?" cried Julia, with a queer catch in her breath.
"Oh, Meer _sahib!_ what a mistake we have all made. It was too late to
write, and then I got ill; but, indeed! I was going down this very
morning to try and make you understand."
"Understand what?" asked the Meer, helplessly confused, adding
hurriedly, "but I can't stay now. She must be found. I will not have
her run away. I will have her back--yes! I _will_ have her back."
Half-an-hour later Julia Smith, driven to the Moulvie's house by
remorseful anxiety, found the wicket-gate ajar. She entered silently
upon a scene framed like a picture by the dark doorway of the men's
court.
Feroza had come back to those familiar walls. She lay beside the well,
and the water from her clinging garments crept in dark stains through
the dust. She had wrapped her veil round her to stifle useless cries,
and so the dead face, as in life, was decently hidden from the eyes of
men. She lay alone under the cloudless sky, for her friends, shrinking
from the defilement of death, stood apart: Kareema sobbing on Mytab's
breast, with Ahmed Ali, dazed yet indignant, holding her hand; the
Moulvie, repeating a prayer; the servants still breathless from their
ghastly toil. Julia Smith saw it all with her bodily eyes; yet nothing
seemed worth seeing save that veiled figure in the dust. She knelt
beside it and took the slender cold hand in hers. "My dear, my dear!"
she whispered through her sobs. "Surely you need not have gone so far,
so very far--for help."
But the dead face was hidden even from her tears.