The saice seemed more weathered than the twenty-year-old girl, for he limped back into the smelly shelter of the servants' quarters to cook his breakfast and mumble about dogs and sahibs who prefer the sun.
She looked shrunk inside the riding-habit--not shrivelled, for she sat too straight, but as though the cotton jacket had been made for a larger woman.

If she seemed tired, and if a stranger might have guessed that her head ached until the chestnut curls were too heavy for it, she was still supple.

And, as she whipped the pony into an unwilling trot and old mission-named Joanna broke into a jog behind, revolt--no longer impatience, or discontent, or sorrow, but reckless rebellion--rode with her.
It was there, plain for the world to see, in the firm lines of a little Puritan mouth, in the angle of a high-held chin in the set of a gallant little pair of shoulders.

The pony felt it, and leaned forward to a canter.

Joanna scented, smelt, or sensed in some manner known to Eastern old age, that purpose was afoot; this was to be no early-morning canter, merely out and home again; there was no time, now, for the customary tricks of corner-cutting and rest-snatching under eaves; she tucked her head down and jogged forward in the dust, more like a dog than ever.