ement he turned round and strode out of the room. They
heard him go downstairs again.

"What is he going to do?" asked Mrs Macphail.

"I don't know." Mrs Davidson took off her _pince-nez_ and wiped them.
"When he is on the Lord's work I never ask him questions."

She sighed a little.

"What is the matter?"

"He'll wear himself out. He doesn't know what it is to spare himself."

Dr Macphail learnt the first results of the missionary's activity from
the half-caste trader in whose house they lodged. He stopped the doctor
when he passed the store and came out to speak to him on the stoop. His
fat face was worried.

"The Rev. Davidson has been at me for letting Miss Thompson have a room
here," he said, "but I didn't know what she was when I rented it to her.
When people come and ask if I can rent them a room all I want to know is
if they've the money to pay for it. And she paid me for hers a week in
advance."

Dr Macphail did not want to commit himself.

"When all's said and done it's your house. We're very much obliged to
you for taking us in at all."

Horn looked at him doubtfully. He was not certain yet how definitely
Macphail stood on the missionary's side.

"The missionaries are in with one another," he said, hesitatingly. "If
they get it in for a trader he may just as well shut up his store and
quit."

"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