To see as little of Mr Burgrave as possible, and to confine the conversation to safe subjects when she did meet him, was the remedy which naturally suggested itself, and Mabel did her best to apply it; but, to her dismay, it did not appear to produce any effect. She had even a distinct feeling that it was just what Mr Burgrave had expected. Moreover, it was extremely difficult to put in practice. Now that the operation had been performed on the patient’s knee, and the leg fixed immovably in a splint, he was allowed to be lifted on a couch, and thus to spend his days in the society of his hosts. Dick was out as much as ever, and when Georgia was busy, it was obviously Mabel’s duty to entertain the invalid. It is sad to relate that when escape proved impossible, she was reduced to assuming an intense interest in the study of Browning, toiling through “Sordello” with astonishing patience. But if any valid excuse offered itself for leaving Mr Burgrave to his own reflections, she embraced it gladly, and when the arrival in the neighbourhood of one of the nomadic tribes brought Georgia a sudden rush of patients, she volunteered at once to help her in dealing with them. The surgery in which Georgia received her visitors was a building standing by itself in the compound, and approached by a special gate in the wall, so that the ladies might come to see their doctor without fear of encountering any rude masculine gaze. As an additional precaution, when the wives of any of the chief men came to the surgery, they brought a youth with them as attendant, who mounted guard over a motley array of slippers at the door, and completed the security against profane intrusion. Inside, Georgia dealt with the cases individually in a small room at one end, while in the large room the visitors sat on the floor in rows, looking at the pictures on the walls, or listening casually to the Biblewoman, trained by Miss Jenkins at the Bab-us-Sahel Mission, who sat among them and read or talked. At the other end was another small room, where a patient and her friends were occasionally accommodated when Georgia had any special reason for wishing to keep the case under her own eye, and the husband was more than usually indulgent. At other times there stood in this room a spring bedstead, which was never used, but which the women made up parties to inspect, personally conducted by Rahah. There was a history attaching to this object of pilgrimage. Two years before a lady globe-trotter of exalted rank, in the course of an adventurous flying visit to the frontier, had spent a night at the Norths’, and been stirred to enthusiasm by Georgia’s quiet but far-reaching work among the women. Her Grace deplored sympathetically the absence of a proper hospital, and offered to put her London drawing-room at Mrs North’s disposal during her next visit home, that she might plead for funds to establish one. Georgia pointed out, however, that the