Where the Monk River makes its way through the mountain wall in one of the northern counties of Vermont, lies the small, white village of Haran. Although isolated and remote from the world, unknown and unconsidered beyond certain narrow limits, this village possessed, forty years ago, a local importance as being the county town, the seat also of a Young Ladies’ Seminary of some reputation, and an Orthodox church which boasted a line of ministers of exalted piety and scholarly attainment.

The incumbent in the year 1869 was the Rev. Samuel Mallison. His pastorate had now extended over twenty years, and he was reverenced far beyond the bounds of his parish for learning and godliness.

It was a June Saturday night in that year, and the hour was late. In the low-roofed garret of the parsonage of Haran the figure of a tall, thin girl with a candle in her hand moved swiftly and softly to the head of a steep flight of stairs, which gave access to the garret from the floor below. Some one had called her name.

“Yes, father,” she returned, and a certain vibration of restrained feeling was perceptible in her voice, “it was I. I am sorry I disturbed you. Were you asleep?”

All was dark below, and no person could be seen, but again came the man’s voice.

“What were you doing, Anna?” was the question.

“Only putting away—” here the girl faltered and stopped speaking. The candle in her hand shook, and threw a strange, wavering shadow of her shape upon the long, rough timbers of the wall. The roof was so low where she stood that of necessity her head was bent sharply forward. The outline of her shoulders was meagre and angular; her arms and body had neither the grace of a girl nor the curves of a woman; they were simply lean and long. There was something of loftiness, and even of beauty, in the face, but the cheeks were hollow, the lines all lacking in softness. The ensemble was grave and strenuous for a girl of eighteen.

She began again.

“I was nailing up that box of books, you remember. I thought now, you know, I ought to do it.”

Something like a groan seemed to float up from the darkness below. There was no other reply for a moment, and then the father’s voice said slowly:—

“To take back later such an action is a greater violation of the moral nature than to avoid performing it. If it has been given you as duty, it is well done, but be very sure.”

A smile, brooding, and even sad, altered the girl’s face as she reflected for a little.

“I am very sure,” she said softly, but without hesitation.

“Then, good night. Sleep, now. Let to-morrow take thought for the things of itself, Anna.”

“Good night, father.” The little lingering of her voice on the last word gave to it the force of a term of endearment, which it would not have occurred to Anna Mallison at that time to add.

A door closed below, presently, and the house was still.

The garret extended over the entire house, and its unlighted spaces seemed to stretch indefinitely on all sides from the little circle of light shed by the one candle. The place was wholly open, save that at the front gable, below the highest point in the peak of the roof, a partition of planed but unpainted boards enclosed a small chamber. The narrow door of it stood open.

As Anna approached this door she cast her glance to a far, dim corner, where in stiff order a wooden box of moderate size stood upon a chest. She crossed to the place, passed her hand over the lid of this box, satisfied herself that it was firmly and evenly fastened, and then gathered up some nails and a hammer, which she put away on the ledge formed by a square, projecting rafter. This accomplished, she came back and entered the chamber, which was sparely enough furnished, undressed, put out her candle, and sat down in the open gable window.

Even if to-morrow were left to take thought for the things of itself, there were many yesterdays which she wished to meet to-night. And for that to-morrow,—she was hardly ready to leave all thought of it yet, for she regarded it as the most solemn and important crisis in her eighteen years of life. On the Sabbath, which a few hours would bring, she was to be received into the village church of which her father was pastor, and this event would signify that all her previous existence, the time past of her life, was a closed and finished chapter, and that henceforth all things were to become new. Life was to be furnished now with new pleasures, new pains, new motives, new mental occupations. A somewhat sterner and sadder life she fancied it, full of self-examination, sacrifice, and high endeavour, for she felt it must suffice her to have wrought her own will in the past, “the will of the flesh,” as her father and the Apostle Paul termed it; a phrase which had but a vague import to her own understanding, and yet exerted a powerful influence upon her conscience.

To her mind there was an intimate connection between that now sealed box and “the will of the flesh.”

It was when she was fifteen years old that Anna had discovered one day among the ranks of chests and trunks which lined the outer stretches of the garret, this small box of books, thickly covered with dust. At first she had been greatly surprised, since books were the things her father most earnestly desired and needed, his scanty collection being quite insufficient for his use, and being helped out by no village library. Every book in the house had borne to Anna’s imagination a potent dignity and value, for each one embodied a persistent need, and represented an almost severe economy before its possession had been achieved.

And here were nearly thirty respectably bound volumes packed away for moth and dust alone to live upon—what could it mean? Had they been forgotten? Anna had devoured their titles with consuming wonder and curiosity, and with the ardour of the instinctive book-lover. Like Aurora Leigh, she had “found the secret of a garret room.”

There was a volume of Ossian,—heroic, sounding words caught her eye as she turned the rough, yellow leaves; Landor’s “Hellenics and Idylls”; a copy bound in marred, brown leather of Pope’s translation of the “Iliad,” published, she noted, in 1806, almost fifty years before she was born; the poems of Byron, Shelley, Keats, and Coleridge, and of the earlier American poets; and a thin gilded volume of Blake’s “Songs of Innocence.”

Besides these were worn volumes of Plato, of Greek and Latin poets, and German editions of Faust and Nathan der Weise. At the bottom of the box Anna found a faded commonplace book with her father’s name inscribed on the first page, and the date 1840. It contained translations of Greek poetry which she supposed to have been made by her father, although of this she was not sure. She did not read them, for she felt that she had no right to explore anything so personal without his permission. This scruple, however, did not extend to the books which filled the box, although Anna felt rather than understood that they had not been packed away together thus by accident, or left by forgetfulness. She perceived that they denoted some decisive experience in her father’s inner life, that spiritual personality of the man, which possessed to the young girl’s thought an august and even mysterious sacredness.

Whatever these books had meant to him, and for whatever reason they had been exiled from his meagre library, they became to his daughter the most brilliant and alluring feature of a somewhat colourless girlhood, the charm of them enhanced by secrecy; for, with the reticence characteristic of the family life, Anna never alluded to her discovery. Neither did she ever remove these literary remains from their seclusion in the garret; this would have seemed an act of violence, but around the box which held them she formed a kind of enclosing barricade of chests and old furniture. The little nook thus formed she regarded as her place of refuge, of private and unguessed delight. A candle at night, and rays of light piercing the wide cracks under the eaves by day, made reading easy to her clear young eyes, even in the dust and dusk of the dim place. And so for two years, through biting cold and searing heat, Anna fed her mind and heart on the poetry which had ruled her father’s generation, unknown and unsanctioned by any one. Then one day came a strange event; she never recalled it without a sense of unshed tears.

It was late one August afternoon, and, her day’s work faithfully performed, Anna had gone up to her garret room to make her simple toilet for the evening meal. There were a few moments to spare, and, as usual, she hastened to her nook, and was soon deep in Prometheus, for Shelley just then controlled her imagination. Her father came into the garret behind her, a very unwonted thing, and Anna heard the sharp, scraping sound as he drew out from the recesses where it had stood for years, a small, brown, hair-covered trunk, studded with brass nails, forming the initials S. D. M. It had been his own during his college days, and had seen but little service since. One of Anna’s brothers was to start for college in a day or two, and the old trunk was to serve a second generation in its quest for learning.

Startled by the unusual noise, Anna rose in her place, and, seeing her father, spoke to him, whereupon he crossed the garret to where she stood; a small, thin man, bent a little, with a pale brown skin, prominent eyes, and a dome-shaped head, the hair thin on the crown even to baldness, but soft and silken and long enough behind the ears to show its tendency to curl.

“What have you there, Anna?” Samuel Mallison had asked, peering with short-sighted, searching eyes between the bars of a battered crib which Anna had used as a part of her wall of partition.

“Poetry, father,” she had replied, handing him the book with eager, innocent enthusiasm; “oh, it is very beautiful! I love it so.”

Her father, looking at the book, flushed strangely, and a sudden, indescribable change passed over his face. Pushing aside the rubbish which separated him from Anna, he was immediately at her side, and in silence had bent over the box. He had drawn it nearer the light, and seemed looking on the side for some sign or inscription. There was a piercing eagerness in his eyes. Then Anna had noticed what had escaped her hitherto, the initials, S. D. M., followed by the reference, Matthew v. 29, and the date, 1848, written in ink on the lower corner, dim with dust stains and faded with the processes of time.

Still her father had not spoken, but, sitting down on a chest, he had bent over the box, and had drawn from it one after the other the buried books, with a hand as gentle as if he were touching the tokens of a dead love. Anna had stood aside, silent and abashed, a strange tightening sensation in her throat. Her father seemed to have forgotten her. At last he had reached the old commonplace book underneath all. The flush on his face had deepened, and Anna had thought there were tears in his eyes as he glanced rapidly over its yellowed pages, with the verses in fine, stiff writing and faded ink. Then he had closed the book with a long sigh, had laid it carefully back in its place, and rising, had walked up and down in the low garret for many minutes in some evident agitation.

A sense of guilt and apprehension had fallen upon Anna in her perplexity, but when, in the end, he had come and stood beside her, there was a great gentleness on his face.

“And so you love those books, my child?” he had asked her briefly.

“Yes, father.”

“I understand. I loved them, but I gave them up—twenty years ago, almost. They became a snare.” He had been, then, silent a moment, while a peculiar conflict of thought was reflected in his face. “Yes,” he continued, as if convinced of something called in doubt, “they became a snare—to me—but for you I cannot decide. It may not be for you to drink of my cup. Who knows?” and with that he had turned and left her, and left the garret, the trunk forgotten; and Anna had laid the books back, soberly and with a great heartache, almost as if she were laying dust dear and sacred in its coffin.

The matter had never been alluded to again between the father and daughter, but Anna knew that she was free to read, and so read on. And still her unalloyed happiness in her hidden treasure was gone. A question, a suspicion, a disturbing doubt, was now attached to it. It was not wrong to read this poetry, but plainly there was a more excellent way, a higher ground which her father had reached, and which, with her inborn passion for perfection, she, too, must some day attain. Slowly and silently this conviction matured within her.

And so to-night, on the eve of her day of supreme consecration, Anna, in her turn, had buried out of her sight, as her father had before her, the poetry into which she had been pouring her young awakening life, silently and secretly, but with a fervour which the reader of many books can never know. They had spoken to her in mighty voices, these great spirits, so free, joyous, and mysterious in their power; but they were not the voice of God, and therefore she must listen to them no more. This had been a tree of life to her, but its fruit was forbidden. The axe must thenceforth be laid unflinchingly at the root of the tree. Such was the initial impulse, single, stern, and absolute, of Anna’s awakening religious nature.

Theologians in the sixties did not talk of the immanence of God.

Anna Mallison’s working theory of the human family in its moral and religious relations (and she recognized no other as of importance) was as destitute of shading as a carpenter’s house plan. Indeed, her hypothesis unconsciously bore a certain pictorial resemblance to the ground plan of a colonial house—a hall running through the middle with two rooms on each side! There was, straight through the centre of her moral universe, a wide, divisive, neutral passage in which dwelt uneasily all people who had not been regenerated, but who had not rejected salvation formally and forever. Here were such heathen and young children, and such thoughtless and unhardened impenitent as might yet listen to the divine call. At the right of this central hall, following Anna’s scheme of the race, were two wide rooms: the first bright with a subdued and varied light; the second, opening beyond the first, overflowing with undimmed and celestial radiance. The first was the Church, the place of saints on earth, the second was heaven, easily reached from the first. But the entrance to the first room from the central space was obscure, difficult, and mysterious, and few were they who found it.

At the left of the great hall were likewise two vast connecting chambers. A wide door stood ever open into the first, through which a throng continually passed. Here were dimness and dread, lighted only by false and baleful gleams; and in the room beyond, the blackness of darkness, and that forever.

This first room was the abode of those who deliberately chose the world and turned away from God, whose fitting end was in the awful gloom of that place of torment and wailing beyond.

Above the right-hand division, high and lifted up, dwelt in unthinkable glory the God of her fathers, holy, but to her subconscious sense, ineffective, else why were earthquakes, murders, prisons, insanities? and why, indeed, those populous chambers on the left?

Over them presided a rapid, hurtling Spirit, always engaged in her imagination in falling like lightning from heaven. He was Miltonic necessarily, but also much like one of Ossian’s heroes, and, on the whole, a more imposing force than the Creator whose power he seemed so successfully to have usurped.

In fine, Anna believed in two gods, an infinite spirit of good, and an infinite spirit of evil, although she would have called herself strictly monotheistic.

The neutral space between the realms of the Good and Evil was the battleground of these two mighty spirits. Here prophets, apostles, and preachers were calling loudly and untiringly upon all men to repent, and to find the entrance to the company of the redeemed. From time to time some swift and valorous spirit of man or angel would even make excursion into the dim outer room on the left, and bring thence a scorched and spotted soul, saved, but so as by fire. But such events were rare and not to be presumed upon or expected.

It was all perfectly clear to Anna, the classification and grouping precise, exact, and satisfactory. Black was very black; and white, very white. She had herself until very recently belonged in the neutral hall, but she now believed herself to be “experiencing religion,” a fine old phrase, which was in effect to be pressing successfully through that obscure opening which led into the outer court of heaven.

But just here there was a weakness in the system. Theologians and preachers like her father boldly declared the contrary, and asserted that the processes of entering the kingdom of heaven were as marked and unmistakable as the great general divisions of saints and sinners. The conversion of Saul of Tarsus was always depicted as norm and type. To be sure, all the processes were not in each case marked by equal distinctness, but the logical order was the same. In the first stage of the progress the sinner was said to be “under conviction” or “experiencing a sense of sin”; and the more bitter and overwhelming was this first phase, the better was the diagnosis from the professional point of view. At this point the penitent was to realize that, whatever his former life had been, even if a life of prayer and unselfish devotion, it had been wholly displeasing to God, and that, as tending to self-righteousness, such a life was peculiarly dangerous. By nature, there could not be in the human character any real moral excellence, or what was more technically known as “evangelical virtue.”

All this Samuel Mallison had recently set forth in a series of sermons on “Human Depravity; its Degree, its Extent, its Derivation, and its Punishment,” which had been considered of extraordinary value and merit.

But it was just here that his daughter, for all the logic and learning to which she was privileged to listen, stumbled and stood still. For weeks her spiritual development appeared to be arrested. She was silent, uncommunicative, and disappointing to all the older members and office-bearers in her father’s church.

“What is the matter with Anna?” was the frequent question put to Mrs. Mallison in the parish. “Why don’t she come out?”

“Oh, she is under conviction all the time,” would be the reply, with a somewhat decided shake of the head. “We let her alone pretty much, Mr. Mallison and I. It isn’t best to say too much, you know, when anybody has reached that point. We can see that conscience is working with her.”

The questioner would depart with the belief that Anna’s conviction was of an unusually profound and interesting nature, like a disease with a complication; but if they had asked Anna herself, she might have told them that it was from the absence of this conviction, rather than from its intensity, that she was suffering. She was too honest to assume a virtue, or even a vice, if she had it not, and seek it as she would, a poignant sense of sin did not visit her. She had cast about her, and searched her own heart and life in a distinct embarrassment at finding so few clearly defined and indubitable sins of which to plead guilty; she had even secretly reproached her parents in her heart for having insisted upon an almost faultless standard of daily living, since conformity to their will seemed to be in itself a snare, and to place her at a distinct disadvantage now as compared with the flagrant sinner. Why had they taught her to pray, since she was now told that the prayers of the unregenerate were displeasing to God?

She used to sit during the Sunday morning service and look at the neighbours in their pews around her, at their children and grandchildren, and at the members of her own family, seeking to find a person whom she was conscious of having wronged, or toward whom she cherished a feeling of enmity or envy. The only result of this species of self-examination had been to bring to her remembrance a childish, half-forgotten grudge against a girl with fair curls, Malvina Loveland by name, who had once ridiculed her at school, for wearing one of Lucia’s dresses made over. Anna drew this dim and fading fault remorselessly up to the light, and formally and forever forgave the unconscious “Mally.” But the longing for a deep experience of the “exceeding sinfulness of sin” remained unsatisfied. Like many another sincere and seeking soul of that day, she yearned in vain to fill out in its rigid precision of sequence that spiritual programme which the theologians prescribed.

Her father gave her free access to the precious, if narrow, resources of his library, and she read the Edwards, both elder and younger, the elder Dwight, Bunyan, Baxter, and the rest, in place of her dear pagans whose end she now clearly foresaw. She read of the “depraved moral conduct of every infant who lives so long as to be capable of moral action”; she read that “the heart of Man, after all abatements are made for certain innocent and amiable characteristics, is set to do evil in a most affecting and dreadful manner”; and that “the darling and customary pleasures of men furnish an advantageous proof of the extreme depravity of our nature.”

“Was I a very wicked little child?” she asked her mother one day.

“Wicked!” cried her mother, artlessly, resenting the thought. “You were like a little angel, Benigna, even from the very first. So was it that I gave you my sainted mother’s name. Even your looks were all love; all saw it, and strangers too. You a bad child, indeed who never gave your mother a harsh word or a heartache since you were born!”

Anna Benigna, for so her mother called her, bent and kissed her mother, a rare caress in that family.

“I am glad I pleased you,” she whispered. There were tears in her eyes, and as she walked without further word from the room, her mother perceived the significance of question and reply, and pondered long.

Then suddenly, as ice breaks up in the spring, and the freshet bears down everything before it, a moment of crisis and perception came, one of those moments which, albeit varying with each human experience, remains in each supreme.

Under all her outward conformity to law and love, Anna realized now that there had lain for years a deep, half-conscious resentment toward the Creator, a cold dislike of God. How could he look upon her with approval while such a disposition remained in her heart? She had loved the human; she had not loved the divine.

A sense of the absolute and eternal Good from which she was alienated, to which she was antagonistic, smote her with force. She now seemed to herself in the presence of God as a speck of dust against a dazzling mountain of snow—incalculably small, hatefully impure. A passion of contrition and surrender mastered her; vague regenerating fires tried her soul; and then came an exhaustion of spirit, as of a child whom its Father has chastened, and who is reconciled and at peace. This succession of emotions she was able to recall distinctly as long as she lived.

This had been a month ago. Anna had recounted these spiritual exercises to her father, and he had told her that they denoted conversion, and advised her presenting herself to the church for admission. This she had done, but when he asked her, further, to what cause, if any, she ascribed this past sense of enmity against God, she had been silent.

However, her father was fully satisfied. Like a physician with a well-declared fever of a certain type, he felt it to be a clear case. Considering his child’s blameless innocence of life, it was an unexpectedly satisfactory one from the theologian’s point of view.

As she sat now in the warm gloom of the June night, with the dark trees murmuring softly under the wind, and the sky with many stars bending near, only the gable jutting above her head to keep its splendours off, Anna travelled back in thought to her childish days and found there the answer to her father’s question.

Until her twelfth year Anna had not encountered the severities of Calvinistic theology, Samuel Mallison having intrusted the spiritual guidance of his children, during their earlier years, to their mother. Anna was the youngest child. Mrs. Mallison was of a German Moravian family who, coming from Pennsylvania, had settled on the eastern boundary of New York early in the century. She possessed the serene and trustful temperament of her people. The subtleties of her husband’s religious system were beyond her simple ken; she loved to sing the hymns of Zinzendorf, as she sewed and spun and ordered her household in true German HausfrÄulichkeit, a sincere, devout, affectionate soul who had found the tone of the frigid little north New England community more chilling than she dared to own.

From her Anna inherited her warm impulses, her abounding delight in nature, her susceptibility to the simplest impressions of sweet and common things. Gulielma Mallison understood the child when she came running to her one early spring morning from the parsonage garden, where the dark brown earth was freshly upturned and young green things were springing, and had tears in her eyes, veiling wonder, and a shy thrill of joy in all her small birdlike frame, and had asked, her hands clasped upon her breast:—

“Why am I so happy, mother, that I can’t bear it? Why does something ache so here?”

“It is because thou art in God’s beautiful world, little Benigna,” the mother had said, “and thou art God’s child. He is near thee, and thy heart yearns to him. Be glad in God.”

In his study, through the open door, Samuel Mallison heard these words, and, whatever his perplexity as to their doctrinal inconsistency, he did not gainsay them. From his point of view at this time little Anna was entirely out of relation to God and out of harmony with his being, and it would have been impossible for her to please him. But just then an old question, which would not always down, had forced its way to his mind—What if there were a wrong link somewhere in the logic? What if the love of God were something greater than the schoolmen guessed?

But on a certain winter night Anna’s childhood died, and the battle of her life began.

Well she remembered every physical sensation even, accompanying that experience.

It had been a snowy Saturday night, and she had come in from the warm kitchen where, in a round washing-day tub, drawn close to the hot stove, she had taken a merry, splashing bath, after the regular order of exercises for Saturday night at the parsonage. Her older sister, Lucia, had presided over the function, and when it was accomplished she had been closely wrapped in a pale straw-hued, homespun flannel sheet, over her nightclothes, preparatory to facing the rigours of the bitterly cold hall and stairs, and the little bedroom above.

So she had trailed into the living-room, where the boys and her parents were gathered around a large table. The room was not very brightly lighted by the single oil lamp, but a great fire crackled loudly in the stove, and the rattle of the hard snowflakes on the window panes and the whistling of the wind outside gave keen emphasis to the sense of cheerful safety and comfort.

Warm and languid from the heat of her bath, Anna had sat down on a low seat and dropped her head on her mother’s knees, feeling an indescribable sensation of happy lassitude and physical well-being. She recalled how interested she had been in the shrivelled whiteness of her own long, little fingers, and how soft and woolly that dear old blanket had felt; it was on her bed now, with her mother’s maiden name worked in cross-stitch in one corner, in pale pink crewel.

They had been waiting for her, to proceed with the evening devotions, and her father had at once begun to read a part of a sermon from one of the standard divines who, though somewhat out of fashion in the centres of progressive thought, were still held infallible in these remoter regions.

The subject was “The Benevolence of God in Inflicting Punishment,” from a work entitled “The Effects of the Fall.”

Anna did not listen very closely for a time, but presently her attention was caught and held. The writer was seeking to prove that “the damnation of a large part of the human race directly subserved the general happiness of mankind and the glory of God.” That even if he had saved none of the sons of men, but “had left them to the endless torment they had so justly deserved,” and “had glorified himself in their eternal ruin, they would have had no cause to complain.” That the best of what were illusively known as “good works,” were “no more than splendid sins.” That no doubt, if any heathen could be found who was truly virtuous and holy, who loved God in the strictly evangelical sense, as infinitely great, wise, and holy, and who kept all his perfect law without infraction, such heathen might be saved. But as there was no evidence that any such heathen ever had existed, or ever could exist, there was no reason to believe that any had been saved. As the heathen still formed a vast proportion of the population of the globe, and as only a small fraction of those nations commonly known as Christian had actually and experimentally come under the law of grace, the only conclusion possible was, that a vast proportion of the human family throughout all ages and down to the present time “were serving the purposes of God’s infinite wisdom and benevolence in their creation in endless misery or torment.”

The triumphant logic of the old divine, which Mrs. Mallison secretly found discomfiting but accepted calmly enough considering its terrific import, and which her husband read with the sad and solemn pathos of one to whom it was a mournful verity, had a curious effect upon little Anna. For the first time the real meaning of familiar words like these smote full and sharp upon her mind, and in the physical lassitude of the moment acted like a bodily injury upon her. She grew whiter and whiter, and she touched and grasped the soft blanket about her with powerless fingers, to convince herself that she could feel and find what was familiar, faintness being an absolutely unknown sensation.

Suddenly, with an imperious impulse, and a singular effect of childish courage which dared to do an unheard-of thing, she rose and said with perfect apparent composure, breaking in upon the reading:—

“I am too tired to stay here any longer, I am going upstairs now,” and so left the room. Her mother had watched the slight figure in its close drapery with anxious eyes until the door closed upon her, but had not thought of following. This reading was a solemn function not to be lightly interrupted.

Upstairs, Anna had betaken herself hastily to bed, and lay there, motionless, somewhat alarmed at her own revolutionary action, and with little to say when questioned by her mother presently.

But when the house was still, and the night advancing to its mid depth of darkness, the child, still lying with wide, wakeful eyes, cried silently with a piteous consciousness of desolation and sorrow. A sense of the bitterness of a world where millions of helpless human spirits were shut up to endless agony had overwhelmed her, and a spirit of rebellion against God who willed it so for his own glory had taken intense possession of her thought.

In the passion of her childish resentment and grief and worn by the unwonted wakefulness, her breath came in long, quivering sobs which were heard in the next room, and brought her father to her side.

She could answer nothing to his questions, but he found her hands cold, and her pulse weak and rapid.

“You did not eat your supper to-night, little Anna,” he said gently, remembering her faint appetite for the frugal fare of the parsonage table.

Anna only sobbed more convulsively. She had expected severity and blame, feeling verily guilty in spirit.

Samuel Mallison said nothing more, but Anna, wondering, heard him go downstairs, heard doors open and shut, and then silence fell again. Ten minutes later her father stood again by the bedside in the icy chill of the winter midnight in the unwarmed chamber, and he had brought a bowl of broth, hot and smoking, bread, too, and, most unwonted pampering, a piece of the rare poundcake, kept for company and never given to children except on high holidays.

Neither of them spoke, but Samuel Mallison, for all the cold, sat on the bed’s edge while Anna ate and drank, drawing her frail little body to rest against his own.

The broth was salted for Anna by her tears, and the long-drawn sobs, coming at intervals, half choked her as she ate, but she was comforted at last and fortified against the woe of the world, and she pressed her cheek against her father’s arm with a sense of the infinite sweetness of fatherhood warm at her heart. As she finished the last crumb of cake, she thought:—

“If only God had been kind like my father! I was naughty, and that only makes him good to me and pitiful.” But she said nothing, only looked with a world of wondering gratefulness in her large innocent eyes up into her father’s face, finding some perplexity that cake and broth should reconcile her to the everlasting torment of the majority of mankind, but wisely concluding to make the best of it since such seemed to be the effect, and, as it was now undoubtedly high time, to go to sleep.

Finding her bright and well next morning, the Mallisons, father and mother, had thought little more of that Saturday night revolt, which they, indeed, had not known as such; but, as she looked back over her years to-night, in her gable window, Anna perceived that from that time there had always been in the secret place of her heart a sense of enmity against a God who was not kind like her father. To-night she knew herself, at last, reconciled; faith had triumphed and declared that even the darkest decree of God’s great will must be right, since he was the absolutely Good. But her heart yearned with mighty yearning for the subjects of his just wrath, and as she knelt in the darkness and silence she gave herself with simple, unreserved sincerity to the service of the lost among men.

Rising from her knees, Anna felt a strange glow and exaltation of spirit. In her own personal life sin had been met and vanquished. Tremendous apostolic assertions buoyed her soul upward like strong wings: “free from the law of sin and of death,” “passed from death unto life,” “All things are yours, and ye are Christ’s, and Christ is God’s.” Thus she felt her finite linked to the infinite. Her spirit was suffused with thrilling and unspeakable joy; God was closer than breathing and nearer than hands and feet.

But, as she stood rapt and absorbed, there came up through the hush of the night from the dim street below a strange sound, and she was caught back by it, and listened painfully. It was a little child crying piteously.

Peering down through the clustering branches, below her window, Anna could discern by the dim light of the stars the shape of a woman, forlorn and spiritless, passing silently along the shadowed way. Behind her followed the crying child, with weary little feet stumbling at every stone. The woman carried something in her arms, hidden by an apron; she turned and looked at the child, and shook her head, but did not speak.

This woman, who moved abroad only at night, was the village outcast, and the child was her child, born in sin.

Vague and uncomprehended to Anna’s mind was the abyss into which this woman had fallen, but she felt it to be black and bottomless, and to place an everlasting separation between her and the good. She drew back from the window, a sharp pain, made of pity and horror, at her heart, sin embodied thus confronting her. She felt as Sir Launfal felt when he saw the leper.

Lying down to rest at last, Anna slept, in spite of spiritual ecstasies and sufferings, the sound sleep of a healthy girl who is fortunate enough to forget the ultimate destinies of human souls, her own with the rest, for certain favoured hours.

It was long before her sleep was disturbed by dreams, but an hour before sunrise she awoke with a pervading sense of exquisite happiness brought over with her from a dream just dreamed. It was a still dream of seeing, not of doing. She had seen the form of a man of heroic aspect, old rather than young, with a grey head, leonine and majestic, strong stern features, a glance mild and yet searching and subduing; a man imperial and lofty, and above his fellows, but whether as king or saint or soldier she could not guess. But here was made visible a power, a freedom, and a greatness for which her own nature, she felt in a swift flash of self-revelation, passionately cried out, which it had nowhere found, and to which it bowed in a curious delight hitherto unknown. This only happened: this mysterious personality, more than human, she thought, if less than divine, had looked kindly upon her, in her weak, childish abasement, and had shed into her eyes, and so into her heart, the impossible, inexplicable happiness with which she awoke. She did not sleep again. This waking consciousness enamoured her.

What did it mean? Anna asked herself all day. Was it a dream sent from God at this solemn hour of dedication? If so, what did it prefigure? Even at the sacramental feast, her first communion, that majestic head, with the controlling sweetness of the eyes upon her, came before her vision, and made her heart beat fast.

Malvina Loveland, the girl whom Anna had found solace in forgiving for her childish offence, had “come out,” as Haran people said, at the same time with Anna.

This fact, and the compunction in Anna’s heart toward her early foe, had drawn the two girls together, and they became friends. They talked of the interests of the cause of religion, and read biographies together, or rather, Anna read aloud while her friend diligently produced lace work with a small shuttle, or hemstitched linen ruffles; but both cared less for these several occupations than for the sense of mingling their young, unfolding perceptions.

Anna had need of a friend; Lucia, her sister, was many years older, and had long ago married a farmer, and departed deeper into the hills, where she worked with the immoderate industry of New England women, bore many children, and lived a life into which Anna did not enter deeply. The Mallison boys were away from home, studying and working, and the parsonage was a silent place. Anna adored her father with the restrained ardour of her kind, and loved her mother with a great tenderness, but she was actively intimate with neither, and thus greatly alone.

Mally was noticeably pretty, and Anna thought her beauty angelic. She was capable, clever, quick, and impulsive, one of the women who can do anything they see done, strongly imitative and impressionable. She developed rapidly, while Anna matured slowly. Anna had nobleness, Mally had facility. Anna, beside Mally, looked uncomfortably tall, with her angular thinness and her dark, grave face. She had masses of lustreless brown hair, a clear brune skin like her father, and, like him, singularly fine hands. Her eyes were her mother’s, and her only beauty,—golden brown, and of limpid clearness.

To both these girls their religion was a system of prohibition and of an abnormal development of conscience. The negative, not the positive, side was uppermost to them. “Thou shalt not” was written over every device and desire which did not minister directly to the furtherance of the local conception of religion. Both were eager to grasp the positive side, to convert the world, to see Satan chained, and themselves to contribute to this desirable consummation; but they were doubtful how to begin. Both were ardent controversialists after the manner of their day, and Anna read systematic theology with her father with extraordinary relish.

They waited and wondered, each longing for her destiny to disclose itself decisively. But with Anna a hidden life budded beneath the surface, unknown even to Mally. The romantic and poetic impulses of her nature, no longer directly nourished by the poets whom she had put away from her by force, stirred in her heart, and fed themselves, in silence, on the life of nature, and on the delicate, evanescent imaginings of her awakening womanhood.

Below the surface of her conscious thoughts a strange inarticulate passion for power and freedom beat and throbbed, and would not be stilled, despite her quiet, conscientious conformity to the narrow conditions of the world about her. She did not know what freedom was, but she felt that she was not free; neither did she clearly know what the power meant for which she longed, but she felt the absence of it in every one she had ever met. It was mysterious, indefinable—once only had she encountered it, and that was in a dream.

Thus a nature simple and single, with all its forces apparently bent one way, and with few avenues, or none, by which to import conflicting influences, was, in fact, already incipiently subject to the complexities of instinct, of motive, and desire, which weave the bewildering network of human experience.

When Anna was twenty, an event occurred of much importance in its bearing on her life. Under the direction of an old friend of Samuel Mallison, the Rev. Dr. Durham of Boston, a general secretary for Foreign Missions, a series of meetings was held in Haran for the promotion of an interest in this cause. Dr. Durham was entertained, during the time of the convention, at the parsonage; he was a genial and kindly man, and became in his way an especial friend of Anna, in whom he manifested a marked interest.

From the country round about, during the week, men and women thronged to Haran; and at an evening meeting to be addressed by a woman who had been a missionary in India, the white meeting-house was filled. Many in the congregation had never seen a missionary; many more had never heard a woman speak in public. Curiosity ran high.

The speaker was a little sallow woman, in a plain and unbecoming grey gown, who stepped timidly to the edge of the platform, laying a small hand which trembled visibly on the cold mahogany pulpit, as if to conciliate it for her intrusion and to crave its support.

She spoke in a shrill crescendo, without the graces or arts of a skilled speaker, and she made no appeal to the emotions of the hearers. It was rather a dry and unimaginative account of the work done at an obscure mountain station, with statistics of no great impressiveness, and careful attention to accuracy of detail. But she had the advantage of sowing her seed on virgin soil. It was not important at that day and to those isolated and simple-minded people that the missionary should speak with enticing words, or attempt dramatic effect. She was herself there before them in flesh and blood, and no great time before she had been on heathen ground, had come into actual combat, face to face, with wild, savage men and strange, outlandish women, who knew not God, and who veritably and visibly bowed down to wood and stone.

For the hour, that little woman of weak bodily presence and commonplace intellect became the incarnation of Christianity seeking a lost world, and she herself was far greater to their thought than anything she could have said.

At the end of her report, for it was that rather than appeal or address, she told the story of a high-caste Hindu woman to whom she had sought to give the gospel message. This woman had turned upon her with grave wonder and had asked, “How long have you known this? about this Jesus?”

“Oh, for many years, all my life in fact.”

“Then,” said the woman, solemnly, “why did you not come to tell us before?”

Without comment or enlargement, having told of this occurrence, the speaker turned and walked shyly from the platform, leaving an unusual hush in the assembly, as if an event, a result of some sort, were waited for.

Toward the end of the church, where she was seated with her mother, Anna Mallison rose in her place, made her way out into the middle aisle, and then, with her head a little bent, but her face neither pale nor agitated, walked quietly to the foot of the platform. Samuel Mallison, who was seated with Dr. Durham behind the pulpit, rose and stood, just above, as if to receive her, looking down with solemn eyes. Some one who saw Anna’s face said that, as she looked up into that of her father thus bent above her, the smile which suddenly illuminated it was beyond earthly beauty. It was a look in which two human spirits, and those father and child, purged as far as might be of earthliness, met in angelic interchange, pure and high.

Turning about, thus facing the great congregation, Anna, who had never before spoken in a public gathering of any sort, however small, said in a voice which was clear and distinct, though not loud:—

“I wish to offer myself to this society to go, if they will send me, to some heathen people, to tell them that Christ has died to save them. I am ready to go at once, if it is thought best.”

The gravity and simplicity, and absence of self-consciousness, of the girl’s words and bearing, and the profound sympathy of the people who saw and heard her, combined to produce an overpowering impression. As the meeting broke up, women were weeping all over the house, and sturdy unemotional men were deeply moved.

Anna, seeing that many would surround her and speak their sympathy or give their praise, which she dreaded and feared to hear, turned with swift steps to the door nearest her, and so escaped into the outer darkness of the night, no one following.

But, as she hurried with light steps across the village green and reached the parsonage gate, she found Mally waiting to waylay her.

“Oh, Anna,” she cried, and her tears flowed fast, “you will go away from me, from all of us! How can you put this great distance between us?”

“How can I do anything else, Mally?” Anna answered softly. “It is what I have been waiting for; I think I was never truly happy until to-night. All my life before I have been unsatisfied, and something has ached and hurt whenever I stopped to feel it.”

“And to-night you are really happy?” cried her friend, half enviously, and yet by no means drawn to devote herself to the medley of crocodiles, dark-skinned babies, and cars of Juggernaut, which signified India to her mind.

“Oh, at last!” Anna exclaimed, and with a long breath of relief. “Will it not bring peace, Mally, to know that I am surely doing His will? It will be like pure sunshine after living in a fog these past years.”

“Then weren’t you really happy when you were converted and joined the church?” asked Mally, naÏvely.

“Partly. But just to be happy because you are saved yourself—why, it does not last. And you know, dear, we could never find anybody’s soul to work for here in Haran; at least, we didn’t know how,” and Anna became silent, the vision of one solitary outcast coming before her, with whom she had been forbidden even to speak. But Mally refused to be comforted thus, and went her way with many tears.

There were more tears for Anna to encounter that night, for her mother came home broken-hearted. The Lord had answered her husband’s daily prayer, and had graciously chosen one of their own family to preach the gospel to the heathen, and the answered prayer was more than the loving soul could sustain. Like Jacob, she could get no farther than the wail, “If I am bereaved, I am bereaved.”

Not so Samuel Mallison. Too long had he schooled himself to the sacrifice of his dearest human and earthly desires. The long discipline of his life stood him now in good stead. Coming into the room where Anna was vainly seeking to comfort her mother, he laid his hands in blessing on her head, and with a look upward which stilled the weeping woman, he pronounced the ancient words:—

And yet Anna was the very apple of his eye. Of such fibre was the altruism of that rugged first growth.

From the time of the missionary meeting and the announcement of his daughter’s determination to devote herself to the service of Christ in a heathen land, Samuel Mallison’s health declined rapidly. His Nunc Dimittis was of literal import, and prophetic.

Whether the death which all who loved him saw that he was soon to accomplish could be called dying of heart-break or dying of fulfilled desire, would have been hard to determine. Heart and flesh cried out against the separation from his best-beloved child, while the triumphant spirit blessed God for answered prayer, and for the fruition in that cherished life of his child of hopes and aspirations which had been but scantily fulfilled in his own.

“I have not been a successful man, Anna,” he said to her one autumn day when they were alone in his study. He sat erect in his straight chair, but with an unmistakable languor in every line of face and frame, and with a feverish brightness in his prominent dark eyes.

Anna laid her hand upon his with endless gentleness.

“No man in Haran is so beloved, father. No man has done so much good.”

“Perhaps,” he answered sadly, “and I am satisfied. It is the will of God. Anna, I have seemed, perhaps, cold and silent, and without feeling as you have seen me; but the fire within has burned unceasingly, and I am consumed.”

The last words were spoken lower and with an unconscious pathos which moved Anna unspeakably.

“I do not understand, father dear, not fully. Can you tell me all? I love you so.”

They were the simplest words of the most natural affection, and yet it was the first time in her life that Anna had spoken after this sort to her father.

“My girl,” he said simply, taking her hand within his own. Then, after a pause, he continued speaking.

“It is after this manner that life has gone with me. I believe I ought to retrace my past with you—for perhaps there may be light upon your path, if you know all. When I entered the ministry it was with sincerely right purpose; all the influences of my life pointed me in that direction, but it was, perhaps, more as an intellectual and congenial profession than from deeper reasons. I began my ministry, in 1841, in Boston. I was considered to have certain gifts which were valued in that day, and all went well, on the surface. But it was the period of a literary awakening in our nation, of which Boston was the centre of influence. An American literature was just becoming a visible reality, and a new impulse was at work and stirring everywhere. Men of original force were suddenly multiplied before us, and the contagion of intellectual ambition was felt in an altogether new degree. To me it became all-controlling. Transcendental philosophy, Platonism, and classic learning acquired for me a supreme attraction, and I gave myself more and more to the study of them, and to the translation of Greek poetry. This had no unfavourable effect upon my preaching in the opinion of my congregation, rather the reverse, and I may say without vanity that I had reached comparatively early a certain eminence to which I was by no means indifferent.”

Samuel Mallison paused a moment, while Anna silently reflected that this narrative would in the end explain the buried books of her dear old garret delight.

“Learning was young among us in those days, Anna,” Samuel Mallison began again humbly, after a little space, “else this would not have happened; in the year 1848 I received a call to a professorship of the Greek language and literature in Harvard College.”

Anna felt her own young blood rush to her cheeks in pride and wonder and amazement. To her little-village simplicity and scanty experience this seemed a surpassing distinction, and one which placed her father among the great men of the earth.

“The day after the mind of the authorities had been made known to me, was the day of my life which I remember best,” Samuel Mallison continued.

“I went to my study that morning with a programme of what would take place somewhat definitely before my mind. I was about to seek, humbly and devoutly, an interview with God, in which I would lay before him this new and momentous opening in my life, and seek to have his will for me made clear. What this will would be, or what I should take it to be, was, just below the surface of my mind, a foregone conclusion. In fact, my letter of acceptance was substantially framed in my mind already. I had never been favoured with voices and visions and revelations clear and conclusive in my religious experience, and I foresaw a decision based upon general reasonableness and preference, touched with a pleasant sense of the divine favour, which might naturally be expected to rest upon so congenial a course, and one so worthily justified by precedent. I read, as a preparatory exercise, with perfect satisfaction, the twelfth chapter of John’s Gospel, then closed my Bible and knelt in prayer. This was exactly as I had foreseen—an orderly series of exercises befitting my position. But, oh; how mechanical, how cold, how barren! With such perfunctory practices I could think to take leave of the sacred calling of the ministry, so dead had my spirit grown to the claims of the blessed gospel, and its mission of salvation to a lost and perishing world!

“I knelt and thought to pray, but, like the king in ‘Hamlet’, my words flew up, my thoughts remained below. Between me and Him whom I would have approached, interposed, like a palpable barrier, a solemn reiterated echo of words just read: ‘Verily, verily, I say unto you, except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone; but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit. He that loveth his life shall lose it.’

“I rose from my knees and walked up and down the room in great anxiety of spirit. This new work which I thought to undertake was educational, ennobling, necessary; in no way contrary to sound doctrine, in no way a betrayal of sacred responsibility; I was fitted for it by nature, by tastes, and attainments. Why was it opened to me? To mock me? to tempt? I could not believe it, I had welcomed it as coming in the providence of God.

“But my heart-searching grew swift and deep, and it was given me to see the absoluteness, the finality, of the vows which I had assumed, from which I straightway realized that no argument of those with which I was equipped sufficed to release me. Feebly and imperfectly, yet sensibly, I began to grasp the import of what the apostle calls the fellowship of Christ’s sufferings, the being made conformable unto his death. Oh, the depth of the mystery hid in that saying! All these years I have sounded it—Anna, all these years I have died, in my own natural life—I have striven to give all I had to give, but the ‘much fruit’—where has it been?”

An expression of pain, hardly less than agony, was impressed upon Samuel Mallison’s face, and Anna hid her eyes, finding it too bitter to bear to see him suffer thus.

“I put it all away from me, then and there. Nothing was possible but for me to decline the invitation which had been given, you can see. Further, I saw that my studies had been my snare. My love of poetry and philosophy and learning, the prominence of my pulpit, the social and intellectual affinities I had formed, all had contributed to my spiritual deadness and decline. It was then that I put away in that box, now upstairs, the books which had particularly ministered to the tastes which had led me so far from the true conception of my life work. Never since that day have I allowed myself to follow the instinct for poetic expression. That longing had to be cut out, even if some life-blood flowed in the doing it. Henceforth, I wished to know nothing but Christ, and him—Anna, do not fail to grasp this—him, not triumphant, but crucified. The offence of the cross to the natural spirit, how hardly can it be overcome! No child’s play, no easy and harmonious growth in grace, has it been to me, but a conflict all the way. Your mother has a different type of religious life. Be thankful if her temperament shall prove to be yours.

“That is the story. I left my church not very long after and sought this rugged, remote section, because it offered hard work and a needy field, which some men shunned. Some years before I had met your mother, and we were married. Twenty years of my life and its best activity have been spent here in Haran. Those first few years and what made life to me in them I have looked upon as a false start. From that day, I sought only this one gift: an especial enduement of the Holy Spirit to give me power with men unto salvation. I desired this gift supremely, but I have not received it in any signal manner. My ministry has not been wholly unfruitful, but it has been lacking in the results for which I hoped; I have not had power with God and men, as have some of my more favoured brethren. The end is near now, very near, but I come with almost empty hands and a humbled, contrite heart to meet my Judge. But, my child, whatever the conflicts of the past years, the last thing which I could wish for to-day would be to have reversed that early decision. My life, from the merely human point of view, might, perhaps, on the line of intellectual effort have been counted successful, while as a minister of Christ it has not been so to any marked degree: but what is success, and what failure, when the things of time fade before our eyes?”

Samuel Mallison’s head drooped upon one supporting hand, and an expression of solemn musing rested on his face, while Anna’s tears flowed fast.

“Just to do our own little day’s work faithfully, not knowing what its part may be in the great whole, just to hold fast to the word of God and the testimony of Jesus, and, having begun the race, to continue to the end—is not this enough?”

There was silence between them for some moments, and then the father said, making a sign to Anna to rise:—

“I want you to leave me now, dear child. I must rest. The one earthly hope to which I still cling is that to you may be given the reward of ‘much fruit,’ which I have failed to win. Remember this, if all the other teaching I have given you shall be forgotten in the years which are to try you, of what stuff you are made: with greatness we have nothing at all to do; faithfulness only is our part.”

Anna Mallison listened to these words with reverent sympathy and loving response, but the deeper meaning of them did not reveal itself to her, her time for perception being not yet fully come.

In the largest theatre of the New England city of Springfield on a night in December, an immense assembly of people was gathered. Every gallery was crowded to its utmost, and the house, from floor to roof, was a dense mass of human beings. On the stage were musical instruments, but the customary scenery was withdrawn, save that the background showed a Neapolitan villa situated on the slope of a Swiss mountain, at the base of which an ultramarine ocean heaved stormily. Against the incongruity of this unstable structure were massed several hundred men and women, and before them a musical leader, baton in hand. At an appointed signal the great chorus stood, and with them, at the gesture of a man, himself seated near the centre of the foreground of the stage, the whole audience, with a rushing sound like the sea or the wind, rose also.

Then there was sung by the chorus, with trained perfection, an old hymn, the words of which, as well as the melody, were of quaint and almost childish simplicity:—

With a swift motion of his baton the leader indicated that the whole assembly was to join in singing the refrain, in lowered voices. There followed in a deep murmur of a pathos quite indescribable:—

At the close of this hymn many people in all parts of the house were in tears, but the hush of motionless silence following was complete, and the eyes of all were riveted upon that central figure on the stage, the man who now rose and, advancing to the front, began to address them.

This man was of majestic personal presence and his speech was with marked power. Thinly veiled under a manner of unusual restraint and quietness lay a genius for emotional appeal and for persuasion. There was in his manner and speech an utter absence of excitability, and yet a quality which excited; a capacity for impassioned eloquence, apparently controlled and held back by the speaker’s will. The congregation listened with absorbed attention.

At the close of the address, which was designed to move all the impenitent or irresolute persons present to an immediate confession of their need of a Saviour, the speaker asked those of this class who were present and were so inclined to advance and take certain seats, directly in front of the stage, which had been reserved for them.

A close observer would have been interested in watching the man as this part of the evening’s work was ushered in. The restrained intensity of his manner was noticeably augmented; his eyes moved slowly and searchingly from one part of the house to another with a gaze which no trifler and no awakened soul might escape. The expression of his face was sternly solemn, even tragical, as of one undergoing an actual travail of spirit. He stood absolutely motionless save for a single and significant gesture of his right hand, an upward gesture made with peculiar slowness and with dramatic effect. It was at once entreating, subduing, and commanding.

At the first moment no person stirred; but presently, as if drawn by an irresistible magnetism, a stream of men and women could be seen advancing down the various aisles, with fixed look, pallid faces, and sometimes with tears. Upon such the speaker bent a look of gentleness and encouragement, in which his features would be momentarily relaxed, only to resume the profound solemnity already spoken of, as he lifted his eyes again to the unmoved masses still confronting him.

The chorus, without rising, now chanted softly the words of vivid appeal:—

Many moments passed. The company of seekers now numbered a hundred. Beneath the absolute outward restraint which held all, an inner excitement grew steadily in intensity, and the subtle contagion of “the crowd” assumed an irresistible sway. It might have become alarming. It possessed elements of terror just below the surface. A climax was reached when a man of gigantic frame and brutalized features, in the upper gallery, stepped forward, and with a gesture rude and almost wild, flung out his arms toward the evangelist, and called through the silence of the place:—

“I give in—you knew I’d have to. Yes, I’m comin’.” And then, turning, clattered down the bare gallery stairs, only to reappear presently below, with his coarse head bent and big tears flowing down his purple cheeks.

Gradually the stream of seekers abated, and the aisles became empty. Thus far no word of appeal or warning had been added to the sermon; save for the restrained monotony of the music this extraordinary scene had taken place in complete silence.

Then the speaker’s voice was heard again, and in it was a strange emotional quality which had been previously unnoticed, and before which the pride and will of many melted within them.

“The people of this company are dismissed to their homes,” he said, in gentle, measured tones; “my work now is for those who have feared God rather than men. They will remain. Let all others go without unnecessary delay, or stopping for speech with one another. The Spirit is here.”

The benediction followed, but as they broke up, scores hitherto irresolute turned and joined the company of seekers in the front of the house.

When the speaker, the house being otherwise emptied, came down to the anxious and disquieted little company waiting for his guidance, he stood before them in silence for a little space, and then, turning to a group of clergymen who were associated with him, he said:—

“Pardon me, but I believe I will leave these friends in your hands, brethren. I wish to return immediately to my lodging,” and saying nothing further in explanation or apology, he departed, with evident haste.

When he reached the lobby of the theatre he found three men watching who hastened toward him, their spokesman, with outstretched hand, introducing himself and his companions and adding, with eager cordiality:—

“This is so much better than we expected. We were prepared to wait for you some time.”

The man received the greeting gravely, and, indeed, silently.

“Will you come with us now to our hotel? We wish to confer with you. We have come from New York for that purpose.”

“Will you not let me know what you wish here, at once?” was the rejoinder. “I am in some haste.”

“Certainly, certainly, if you prefer it,” said the other, cheerfully, hiding a shade of discomfiture. Then, with a change to serious emphasis, he proceeded: “We want you to undertake a work in New York this winter, as soon as possible, in fact. A large group of prominent churches is ready to unite in the movement, and unlimited resources will be placed at your disposal. Your own compensation, pardon me for alluding to it, will be anything you will name—that is a matter of indifference to the committee, save that it be large enough. We are ready to build you a tabernacle two hundred feet square,—larger if you like.”

The man addressed involuntarily laid his hand on his breast; a letter in the pocket under his hand, from Chicago, specified a tabernacle three hundred feet square. He smiled slightly; even religious zeal was a size larger in Chicago than elsewhere.

Further details were mentioned, but the evangelist seemed to give them a forced and mechanical attention. Then, rather suddenly, he broke in with a word of apology.

“I am fully sensible, gentlemen,” he went on, “of the confidence you have manifested in me, and I would, under other conditions, have accepted your proposition. But the very circumstance of your making it to-night hastens an action on my part which I have been approaching, but had not, until now, definitely determined upon. I am about to withdraw from this work, and can form no engagements, however promising. I shall close the meetings here as soon as I can honourably do so, and these meetings are, for the present certainly, my last.”

The blank faces of the three men before him seemed to demand a word or two more.

“My reasons?” he asked with curt and almost chilling brevity. “Pardon me. They are personal to myself. Good evening. No one can regret your disappointment more than I.” With these words the speaker turned abruptly from the little group and left the theatre. In great amazement and perplexity the committee of three presently followed his example.

Here was an accredited and earnest man, no irresponsible religious tramp, who possessed, apparently in a superlative degree, the gift of winning souls for which Samuel Mallison had given his all, if in vain, and for lack of which he might fairly be said to be dying, being one who could have lived on spiritual joy, if such had ever been his portion. And this man, possessing this coveted and crowning religious endowment, was deliberately putting it aside, and refusing to use it. What did it signify?

Anna Mallison had left Haran, in its ice-bound valley, early that morning, and, by travelling through snowdrifts in a sleigh all the forenoon, had been favoured to get as far as Springfield on her journey, at nine o’clock of that same evening. She was bound for Boston, where she was to go before the missionary board to be examined as to her fitness and promise for a worker on the “foreign field.”

At the Springfield station Anna had been met by the little missionary lady whom she had heard and met in Haran on her night of great decision. By her she had been conducted to a hotel, shown to a room, affectionately if reticently counselled, and then left to sleep and be ready for another early start on the following morning. It was the first time Anna had ever been in a city, and she was bewildered by the noise and lights in the streets through which she had been hurriedly driven.

Left alone, she looked about her at the stiff order of the narrow hotel chamber, the first she had ever inhabited, the showy, shabby carpet, the cheap carvings of the furniture, the long mirror in which she herself stood, still and dreary, and a rushing wave of heart-sickness swept over her. Her anxiety for her father became suddenly poignant; a sense of the sadness of his life tore her heart with fierce pain: she realized now, as she had failed to before, how fast his strength declined. She longed to know how that moment fared with him, and how the next would. A wild purpose seized her to return the next morning to Haran, and let all other purposes go until some later time.

However, in spite of all this anxiety and doubt, Anna’s physical weariness was sufficient to bring sleep apace, when once her head was on the pillow, and all the distant murmur of the city and the sudden, uncomprehended noises of the great house were soon lost to her. Thus she failed to hear a man who entered the room next to hers within the same hour, who closed the door with some emphasis and locked it fast; who, after that, walked up and down within the narrow limits of that room with uniform, slow step, and who continued to do this until the December dawn filtered through the dim windows. All was still in that next room when Anna awoke. The anxiety and homesickness of the night before were gone, and in their place was that mysterious joy which once before on a June night had strangely visited her. Again, in her dream, she had seen the face which ever since had dominated her; as before, it was majestic, free, and strong. As before, it had bent to her,—

She rose hastily, glad and awed and greatly wondering. At six o’clock she was ready and went down to the great dining-hall, dark save for the wan light of a single gas jet under which she sat down, silent and alone, and was served by a heavy-eyed, untidy man-servant, with an indifferent breakfast. She swallowed a few mouthfuls by force of will, then gathered up her humble belongings, and started out alone into the icy chill of the grey morning. It was too early for her friend from the Orient to brave the rigours of the unaccustomed winter. It was all comfortless, dreary, and inauspicious; small cheer for a young girl starting on such an errand, but there was no sinking now of her spirit. She walked to the Springfield station in the light and warmth of that inexplicable radiance of her dream, and so pursued her journey to Boston.

Do you believe in the mutual penetration of mind? Do you believe that, independent of word and voice, independent of distance, from one end of the world to the other, minds can influence and penetrate one another?... Do you not know a soul can feel within it another soul which touches it?

January 28, 1870.—A week to-day since my father was buried. It is late at night, and I have come up to my little roof room, but I cannot sleep. I have been with my mother, and we have cried together, until she sleeps at last, so tired, and her dear face changed so sadly that, as she slept, I was almost afraid. And yet she is greatly upheld, and as gentle and uncomplaining as it is possible to be.

But for me, knowing my father, and trying to find the meaning of his life, these days give me less grief than wonder and perplexity. For a time after my father told me the story of his past, after I knew what he might have been, knew his great renunciation, his utter humility, his leaving all to seek one only thing, and that a gift for others, and even that being denied him, so that to himself his life seemed a failure, and its supreme sacrifice unsanctioned and unblessed—after this I could hardly bear the heart-break of it all. So pure, so blameless, so devoted a life, and yet, to his own thought, so unfruitful. Just a narrow little village church, with its narrow little victories and defeats, and its monotony of spiritual ebb and flow—this was the sum of his achievement. Was it not hard of God? This he would not have said, but my undisciplined heart has cried out in bitterness and rebellion. I have been in deep doubt and darkness.

To-night it is given me to see it all in light, and I am reconciled. The word which changed my father’s life was that great word of the Master, “Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone.” That dying, the utterness of it, was what we did not comprehend. I think my father understood before he left us, although he could not express it. But all along he had felt that in dying in his own personal life to the world and to his ambition, he was meeting the condition, and that in his own personal life the fruits of that death were to be manifest, that he should be set for the salvation of many. But God sees not with our short vision. Days with him are years, and years days; and our whole life but a vapour, which appeareth for a little time, and then vanisheth away.

This has come to me: My father’s sacrifice has borne in the life of one of his children, if not in all, the fruit of an especial dedication of that life to the service of God. If he had not been the man he was, if he had not laid down his life daily and hourly in humble self-surrender to the Divine Will, never, never should I have dreamed of giving myself to the work to which I am now pledged. His life, in its deepest working, had been wrought into mine, so that unconsciously I willed to be what he would have willed to have me. So, then, it is no more I alone, but the spirit, the will, the nature of my father that worketh in me.

The God of my father—this phrase, so common, so almost commonplace before, has suddenly taken to itself an extraordinary significance. My father’s God, my God, who began in my father’s willing sacrifice of all the noblest powers of his manhood his purpose of grace, will now, in his good pleasure, carry on the one work, the same so begun, through me, all unworthy as I am, timid, trembling, but a child. A child, and yet called with this high calling; child of a saint, called solemnly, sacredly, in the very depths of my being, deeper than I feel, higher than I know, to be my father’s child, to be the continuance, the fulfilment of his dying life, to finish what he began, to bring to fruitage the seed he died to sow. How sublime, how sweet, how awful the vocation wherewith I am called!

Then look upon me, O my God, my father’s God! Behold my weakness; raise it into power; turn my dull mind to light, my hard and narrow heart to a flame of love; make me thy minister, thy messenger, fulfil in me all thy great will.

February 20.—To-night I am alone in the old home, not our home any more. It is stripped already of all that made it home, but, bare and grim as it is, I love it, and leave it with a sorrow my heart is yet too tired to realize. They have consented to let me sleep this one last night in my own little room. This poor bed is to be left, being not worth removing, and all that clothes it goes with me. So, like a pilgrim, under a tent roof for a single night, I lie alone, and look up beyond the dear old gable and see the winter stars.

They shine upon his grave, and the snow already has drifted over it, and my heart bleeds. Why will they not let us pray for our dead as the Romish people do? Oh, kind little father, gone what dim, dazzling way I do not know, will they let you be happy at last? Will God let you see why?

February 21.—It was a strange night, and yet most beautiful.

I hardly slept, but prayed until nearly dawn. Then I slept a short time, and woke to find my limbs racked with pain from the bitter chill of the room, and tears running down my face. Almost as if I were carrying out an order given me in my sleep, I hurried on my clothing, and, taking my candle, came down the stairs, both flights, through the empty, echoing house, to the rooms below. I was so cold that I shook from head to foot. Then I found in the kitchen wood left from our store, and I brought it into the east room, the parlour, where we laid my father after his death, and where I had sat beside his dear form each night. The great fireplace was bare and empty, like the room, but the andirons were left.

I laid the wood across and started the fire, and it blazed and gave light, and threw strange shadows about the room, and I kneeled beside it, on the hearth, as I used sometimes when I was a little child, and warmed my hands, and still I cried, and there was no one to comfort me.

Mally says she would have been afraid—in that room. I cannot understand. It is because her dearest have not died. What of him could have been anything but precious? To have felt his spirit near me! That would indeed have been holy consolation.

But what if that were true? I do not know. While I so crouched in the chimney corner, my heart bleeding, and the tears bathing my poor face, there was a soft touch, lighter than the flight of a thistledown, passing over my head, as if the gentlest hand God himself could make gentle had smoothed my hair, and sought to comfort me.

Then some one said: “I came here to be with you.” But I do not know whether it was I who so said in my own heart, or whether the words were spoken to my ear. I only know that I was comforted, and the fire warmed my aching limbs, and my head drooped against the wall, and I slept with long sobs, as I slept once when I was a child, and my dear father ministered to me.

It was broad daylight when I awoke, and I felt soothed and strong. I rose to go and make ready to lock and leave the house. But first I knelt and prayed, and I am praying still.

Live in me, O God, as my father lives in me, and as thou didst live in him. Let me live the life and die the death which he sought to live, to die, for thee. Give thou unto him through me abiding fruit in the salvation of souls; and grant us such grace as that we may humbly and worthily fulfil thy gracious will, I on earth, as he in heaven.

She [Dorothea] could not reconcile the anxieties of a spiritual life involving eternal consequences, with a keen interest in gimp, and artificial protrusions of drapery.—Middlemarch, George Eliot.

A small house in a small street of a small provincial city. A faded brown house with its front door directly on the street, the steps jutting into the sidewalk. A narrow strip of yard overlaid with grimy snow separated this house from others on either side, equally unnotable and uninteresting, the dwellings of mechanics and small tradesmen.

It was the close of a rough March day, the wind had not died with sunsetting, and a thin, piercing rain, colder than snow, was driven before it into the very teeth of the few passers-by.

A tall woman, in a straight black dress with a dyed black shawl drawn tightly around her shoulders, was making her way down the street dead against the wind, which beat her hair out into wet strands and bound her skirts hard about the slender long limbs. She made no useless attempt to hold an umbrella; in fact, she carried none, but was heavily burdened with four or five large books. She was girlish in figure after a severe sort, her step steady, her movement without impatience or fluttering, in spite of the struggle with the wind. Seeing her face, the absorbedness of sorrow in it was profound enough to explain indifference to sharper buffetings than those of the wind. It was Anna Mallison.

When she reached the house she deposited her books on the icy step and drew from her pocket with stiffened, aching fingers a key with which she unlocked the door. The house was unlighted, and its close, airless precincts apparently empty.

Stooping, Anna gathered her books again and closed the door, then groped her way to a steep staircase, a weary sigh escaping her as if in spite of herself. The room which she entered, silent and dark at her coming, showed itself, when she had lighted a lamp, a low but spacious living room, stiffly and even meagrely furnished. Opening beyond it was a smaller bedroom.

Having laid aside shawl and bonnet, Anna made preparation for a simple evening meal for two persons. Not until these were made did she stop to realize that she was chilled and that her shoes were wet through. Characteristically it was of the shoes she took cognizance rather than of her feet—circumstances having thus far led her to regard health as an easier thing to acquire than food and raiment.

There was a sudden outburst now, from below, of merry voices, both a man’s voice and a girl’s, in loud and cheerful banter, then the house door shut with a bang, there was a quick step on the stairs, and a gay, fluttering, wind-blown figure of a pretty girl appeared in the upper sitting room. It was Mally Loveland, Anna’s early Haran friend and companion.

“Holloa, Anna!” she called lightly, “lucky for me you got in first! A fire is a good thing, I tell you, on a night like this.” Mally’s voice had acquired a new ring of self-confident vivacity.

“You’re a little late, Mally,” remarked Anna, quietly, as she returned to the room. “Shall I make tea?”

“Oh, yes, do; there’s a dear. Oh, such fun as we’ve been having at the Allens’! But I’m so chilly and damp, you know; and just look, Anna, at the ribbons on my hat.” Mally held up to view a pretentious structure of ribbon and velvet which had plainly suffered many things of the elements.

“Too bad. I hope you won’t go out again to-night, your cold was so bad yesterday. It is a wretched night.”

“Oh, I must go out, my dear—must indeed! Couldn’t disappoint the girls, you know.”

“Nor even the boys?” asked Anna smiling.

Mally laughed at this, evidently pleased. In a few moments she was ready and they took their places at the tea-table, Mally quieting herself with an effort, in order to ask a brief blessing upon the meal. It was her turn to-night. The two coÖperated in their religious exercises of a general character, as well as in their housekeeping.

Destiny, so eagerly challenged by these two village girls in the eventless isolation of their life in Haran, seemed at last to have declared itself decisively: both were to catch men,—Anna in the apostolic sense, Mally in a different one.

Anna’s journey to Boston, three months earlier, had been successful. She had returned under appointment as a missionary to India; but being still too young to go out, the Board had advised her to spend the following two years in studies especially designed to develop her usefulness in work among the heathen. In January Samuel Mallison had died. The parsonage, where the children had been born and nurtured, could thus no longer be their home. It must be made ready now for a successor.

It had been a sorrowful breaking up, and when the melancholy work was done, and the home effaced forever, the mother, patient and uncomplaining, departed with Lucia to the lonely farmhouse among the hills, to take on again, in her later years of life, the many cares of tending little children. It was then that Anna, accompanied by her friend Mally, had come to Burlington with the purpose of studying at a collegiate institute, which offered opportunity for more advanced study than could be had in Haran. Anna was hard at work every morning on Paley’s “Evidences” and Butler’s “Analogy,” while her afternoons were spent in the small hospital of the town, in an informal nurses’ class, as it was even then considered a useful thing for missionaries to go out with some equipment for healing the bodies of men as well as their souls. Mally, by her own account, was “taking” music, painting, and French.

As they sat at their little table now, with its meagre and humble fare, but its indefinable expression of refinement, Anna and Mally were in striking contrast.

It has been said before that Anna matured slowly. There was still in her face, despite its sadness, the grave wonder, the artless simplicity, and the sweet unconsciousness of a child. Her figure was angular and undeveloped; her black dress, absolutely, harshly plain, and of coarse stuff; her face, far too thin and colourless for beauty. She was, plainly, underfed and overworked; but there was, nevertheless, a dignity and a distinction in her aspect which emphasized Mally’s provincialness, notwithstanding the little fashionable touches about dress and coiffure which the latter had swiftly and instinctively adapted to her own use.

Anna had the repose of a person who is not concerned at all as to the impression she makes, or desirous of making any personal impression whatever. Mally had the restlessness, the vivacity, the eagerness, of a woman who wishes everywhere and at every time to make herself felt, to be the central figure. She was born an egotist, and even “divine grace,” in the devotional phraseology of that time, had not been sufficient to overcome her natural bent. At the present time, in fact, egotism was having comparatively easy work with her, and an indefinite truce with the religious conflicts of earlier days had been tacitly declared. That spiritual experience had been sincere, and it had lasted several years. Fortunately, to Mally’s unspoken thought, she had been favoured during those years to work out her salvation, which was now, according to a prime doctrine of the church, secured to her against all accidents. This being so, no one need be concerned for her; and if she were herself satisfied with a low spiritual attainment, it was nobody’s business but her own.

She had, to her own naÏve surprise, met with a marked degree of social success in a certain middle-class stratum of the small town. She was pretty, clever, adaptive; the young men and women of her set said she was “such good company.” This was high praise. In Haran the natural order for a marriageable girl was to be soberly and decorously and protractedly wooed by one young man, to whom, in process of time, she was married. Here Mally found a far more stimulating social condition. Not one man, but many, might be the portion of a popular girl, and Mally found the strength of numbers very great. The sex instinct, the ruling desire to attract men, sprang into vigorous action, and became, for a time at least, predominant. Women of whom this is true are often very good women, with energy and common sense, but it is important for their friends, for various reasons, to hold the master key to their character.

Anna Mallison, at this period of her life as sexless in her conscious life as a star, looked on at this rapid and unlooked-for development of Mally’s nature in infinite perplexity. She had always liked certain men, even outside her own kindred, but it was because they were wise or good or sincere, not because they were men. A thirst for admiration being thus far undeclared in her own life, Mally became inexplicable to her; she did not hold the key to her character, and involuntarily she withdrew more and more into herself, her only friend becoming thus uncomprehended. If she felt this in any degree, Mally, being closely occupied with more tangible consideration, paid small heed to it.

While they were taking tea, Anna kept her eyes fixed on the mantel clock, and, having eaten hastily, rose from her place.

“What is the matter?” asked Mally, looking up. “Oh, of course; but, dear me, Anna, I never would bother to get things ready for old Marm Wilson, after the way she grumbles at you. Sit down, do. You’ll never get any thanks, I can tell you that; and what’s the use?”

Anna was at the door already. “I think it’s late enough now to be safe. She only grumbles, you know, if the oil and wood burn out awhile before she gets here. She was to work quite near on Hill Street, to-day, so she will surely be in early.”

“Oh, well, go on if you’ve a mind to. I suppose it is forlorn on a night like this for the poor old creature to find her house all dark and cold,” Mally spoke carelessly, half to herself. Anna was already half-way downstairs.

Mrs. Wilson was their houseowner, a seamstress of narrow means and narrower life whose upper rooms they rented.

An hour later the upper sitting room was suddenly enlivened and almost filled, as far as seating capacity was concerned, by a group of Mally’s friends, who had come to escort her to an evening gathering. These young men and maidens, whom Anna had scarcely seen before, seemed to explain the new Mally to her, and to place her at a different angle, as one of a class, not one by herself. The girls all wore a profusion of ribbons and curls, and were all in an effervescence of noisy excitement regarding the effect of the dampness on their hair and their finery; they whispered and giggled together, and pouted at the young men, or tossed their heads and assumed exaggerated airs of being shocked at the personal remarks which these attendants volunteered, and with which they were, in fact, palpably delighted.

Anna, who attempted some quiet civilities from time to time, was regarded with undisguised indifference, as not being “one of the set.”

After the young people had left the house, however, Mally’s companion on their expedition, a young man somewhat above the others in intelligence, said to her:—

“What an unusual girl that friend of yours, that Miss Mallison, is. I never met any one just like her. She strikes me as a girl who would keep a fellow at a mighty distance; but if she ever did care for him, he wouldn’t mind dying for her, you know, and all that sort of thing. But she isn’t one of the kind you like to play games with.”

To the surprise of both the friends, Anna, who had gone about her rigorous tasks unseen and unnoted hitherto, began about this time to come into a certain comparative prominence in the quiet little city.

A day or two after the evening described in the last chapter, Anna received a note from Mrs. Ingraham, the wife of a distinguished citizen of the town, a man of great wealth, and a well-known senator. The Ingrahams were, perhaps, the most highly placed family in the little town, by right of distinguished antecedents, of wealth, and of habit of life. They belonged to that singularly privileged class, which Anna Mallison had not hitherto encountered, who have both will and power to appropriate the most select of all things which minister to the individual development, whether things material, things intellectual, or things spiritual. Thus Mrs. Ingraham and her daughters were women of fashion, prominent figures at the state functions of their own state, and well known in the inner circles of Washington society. They dressed superlatively well in clothes that came from Paris. At the same time they were as much at home among literary as among fashionable folk, and Mrs. Ingraham at least was understood to be devotedly religious, with an especial penchant for foreign missions. In fine, all things were theirs.

Thus it was an event for Anna Mallison, in her dull, low-ceiled upper room, to open and read the note of Mrs. Senator Ingraham to herself,—a note written in graceful, flowing hand, on sumptuous, ivorylike paper, squarely folded, with a crest on the seal, and the faintest suggestion of violets escaping almost before perceived. The note was delicately courteous, a marvel of gracious tact. Mrs. Ingraham had heard through a friend that Miss Mallison was under appointment as a missionary to India, and had sincerely wished to meet her. On Friday evening a dear Christian worker from Boston, now her guest, was to hold a little parlour meeting at the house for the help and encouragement of friends who were interested in a higher Christian life. Would not Miss Mallison give them all the pleasure of making one of that number? Mrs. Ingraham would esteem it a personal favour; and if Miss Mallison felt that she could tell the little company something of the experience she had had in being led into this beautiful life work, it would be most acceptable. However, this was by no means urged, but merely suggested and left entirely to Miss Mallison’s preference.

The man who had brought the note waited on the narrow walk below for Anna’s answer. He wore a sober but handsome livery.

This was the first invitation of the kind which Anna had received, but she had now somewhat accustomed herself, by the advice of the Board, to speaking in women’s missionary meetings, and it seemed to her right to say yes. Accordingly, on untinted note-paper of a very common grade, she said yes in a natural and simple way, and made haste to give the note to the man at the door below, whom she felt distressed to keep waiting.

This man removed his shining hat in respectful acknowledgment as he took the note, and told Anna that Mrs. Ingraham had asked him to say, having forgotten to mention it in her note, that in case Miss Mallison would be so kind as to come, Mrs. Ingraham would send the carriage for her at half-past seven on Friday evening.

Anna felt that she ought to deprecate so much attention, and timidly attempted to do so; but the man plainly was not further empowered to treat in the matter, and, bowing respectfully, departed with Anna’s pallid, long and narrow envelope in his well-gloved hand.

When Mally came in, Anna handed her Mrs. Ingraham’s note. Mally’s face flushed noticeably as she read it. It was not easy for her to have her quiet friend thus preferred.

“You’ll go, of course?” she commented rather coldly, as she handed it back.

“Yes.”

“I should think you would by all means. Who wouldn’t? I’ve heard lots about Mrs. Ingraham; she believes in a very high religious life, you know, and those rich higher-life people live high, I can tell you. There’ll be a supper, depend on that, and it will be a fine one.”

“Oh, I don’t think there will be anything of that kind,” interposed Anna, hastily.

“You see!” cried Mally, with an air of superior wisdom and wide social experience. “Oh my! if I should tell you all I’ve heard about those Ingrahams, you’d be surprised. One night they have a prayer-meeting and the next night a dance. It’s all right, I suppose. Kind of new, that’s all.”

On the following evening, when the luxurious Ingraham carriage was driven up before Mrs. Wilson’s poor little house, many eyes peered narrowly from neighbours’ windows to catch the unwonted sight; and Anna, slipping hastily out of the Wilson door, felt an access of humility in this exaltation of herself, for such she knew it seemed to her neighbours, transient though it was. She had suffered a guilty and apologetic consciousness all day toward Mally, who had treated her with a slight coolness and indifference, which afflicted Anna keenly.

When Anna entered the hall of the Ingraham house, a small, stout woman, in a brown dress and smooth hair, came out to greet her, and took her hand between both her own, which were white and soft and heavily weighted with diamonds. Anna found the diamonds confusing, but she knew the hands were kind. Mrs. Ingraham’s manner, of sincere kindliness and dignity, put Anna wholly at her ease, and she looked about her, presently, at the subdued luxury and elegance of her surroundings with a frank, childlike pleasure. Her absolute unconsciousness of herself saved Anna from the awkwardness which her unusual height, her angular thinness, and her unaccustomedness to social contact might otherwise have produced. She wore her “other dress,” which was of plain black poplin, but quite new, and not ungraceful in its straight untortured lines; and as she entered the great drawing-room, with its splendours of costly art, and met the eyes of many people who were watching her entrance, the quiet gravity and simplicity of her bearing were hardly less than grace.

Two women, dressed with elegance and apparently not deeply touched with religiousness, commented apart a little later, having met and spoken in turn with the lady from Boston and the young missionary elect.

“What do you think of Mrs. Ingraham’s new saints?” asked one, whose black dress was heavily studded with jet ornaments.

“I like the young missionary better than the Bostonian, myself,” was the reply. The speaker had red hair and an exquisite figure. “Isn’t she curious, though?” she continued. “Manners, you know, but absolutely no manner! I never encountered a woman before, even at her age, who positively had none.”

“That is what ails her, isn’t it?” returned her beaded friend. “You’ve just hit it. And you can see that tremendously developed missionary conscience of hers in every line of her face and figure, don’t you know you can?”

“Figure, my dear? She has none. I never saw such an utter absence of the superfluous!”

Here they both laughed clandestinely behind their laced handkerchiefs.

“Do you know how I should describe that girl?” challenged the Titian beauty, recovering.

“Cleverly, without doubt.”

“I should call her a scaffolding over a conscience.”

“That is really very good, Evelyn. You can see that she is not even consciously a woman yet. She knows nothing of life or of herself or of this goodly frame, the earth, save what that New England conscience of hers has interpreted to her. Her horizon is as narrow as her chest.”

“Poor thing. How will she bear life, I wonder!” and the words died into a whisper, for at that moment the little talking, moving groups of men and women were called to take the chairs, which had been arranged in comfortable order, and give attention to what was to follow.

Anna was the first to speak. When she rose and faced the little audience, made up of fashionable women, professional men, and a sprinkling of the more clearly defined religious “workers”, she did not feel the coldness underlying their courteous attention. The Titian beauty fixed upon her eyes full of unconsciously patronizing kindness, and Mrs. Ingraham smiled at her with sympathetic encouragement, but they might have spared themselves the effort. Anna did not perceive or consider these things. She was not thinking of them at all, nor of herself.

The peculiar twofold consecration which rested upon her spirit in regard to her missionary vocation, as a call to fulfil at once the Divine Will and the will of her father, was so profound and so solemn as to remove her from personal and passing cares. She would not herself have chosen to appear before these people and to speak to them of her supreme interest; but to do so had been laid upon her as duty, and Anna’s conception of duty, by reason of the “tremendously developed conscience” which the worldly-wise women had discerned in her, was of something to be done. She did this duty with the simple directness of a soldier under command. She stood erect and motionless, with no nervous working of hands or trembling of lips, and spoke in a clear, low voice, in which alone, by reason of a peculiar vibrant pathos, the profound, undeclared passion of her nature was suggested.

Her critics of the early evening had been right in finding her destitute of manner. There was no slightest evidence as she spoke of the orator’s instinct—the magnetism of kindling eye and changing expression, of the conciliation and subtle flattery of her hearers. Neither had she fervid personal raptures nor spiritual triumphs to communicate. Of the picturesque and pathetic elements of the situation she made no use whatever. She had simply an absolute, dominating conviction that the heathen were lost; that they could only be saved by the knowledge of Christ; that this knowledge must be conveyed to them by the disciples of Christ at his command; and that she, Anna Mallison, was humbly grateful that she was permitted to devote herself to a service so obviously necessary. Of these things she spoke; of the sacred sense of living out her father’s disappointed life she naturally could not speak.

It was not the speech which Mrs. Ingraham and her guests had expected. They had looked to have their sympathies aroused by a pathetic recital of sacrifice and exalted self-devotion. Anna, on the contrary, was unconscious of sacrifice, and felt herself simply grateful for the privilege of carrying out her innermost desires.

The people who heard her felt that to give up “the world” was a mighty thing. Anna did not yet know what “the world” was. To their anticipation, she had been a figure almost as romantic and moving as a young novitiate about to take conventual vows; to herself, she was an enlisted soldier who has received marching orders, and whose heart exults soberly, since there are ties which may be broken, and death, perhaps, awaiting, but even so exults with joyful response.

Thus, to most of those who heard her, Anna’s little speech was a distinct disappointment; the very loftiness of her conception of her calling made it featureless, and robbed it of adaptation to easy emotional effect. The ladies who had discussed her before her speech found, after it, that it was, after all, exactly what might have been expected—altogether of a piece with the austerity of her figure, and her sad, colourless face, no warmth, no emotion—just the hard Puritan conscience at its hardest.

There were two or three only who felt the spiritual elevation belonging to the girl and to what she said, and the underlying pathos of her high restraint, as too great to put into the conventional phrases of sympathy and praise, and so kept silence.

There was a brief pause after Anna returned to her seat, during which people stirred and spoke in low tones, and the beaded lady leaned over and thanked Anna for her “charming little talk”. Then Mrs. Westervelt, the guest from Boston came forward and began speaking with a winning smile, a gentle, soothing voice, and an affectionate reference to “the dear, sweet young sister.” She had the ease and flexibility of the practised public speaker; the winning and dimpled smile with which she won the company at the start was in frequent use, and she made constant motions with a pair of very white hands. She was quietly dressed, and yet, after the straightness of Anna’s poor best gown, her attire had its own air of handsome comfort. The perfect command of her voice and of herself established instantaneously a rapport with her audience, of which Anna, in her inexperience, had never dreamed.

Her beloved Mrs. Ingraham, she said, had asked her to tell the dear friends of some wonderful answers to prayer which she had recently experienced, but before doing this she craved the privilege of reading a few verses of Scripture.

She then read certain passages from the prophecy of Zechariah, detached from one another, taken entirely from their historic setting, but fitted together with some care. The speaker explained that she had, in her earlier Christian life, found some difficulty in interpreting this rather obscure passage, but in the new life of complete sanctification, into which it had been her glorious privilege to enter, she had come to see all Scripture by a new and marvellous light. No longer did she trust to the dry and formal explanations of scholars, many of whom, it was but too well known, had never had the deep things of God revealed to them, and who had been led into many errors by their pride of learning. All that kind of study was past for her, for the dear Lord himself showed her, when she lifted her heart to him, just what he meant in his blessed word. This had been her experience in regard to the passage just read. To the natural mind there were difficulties in it, but just below the surface was the great precious truth which God would have all his children receive. It had been given her that when she came to the beautiful home of Mrs. Ingraham, and should be called upon to speak to these friends, she must bring them this particular passage. But it had looked dark to her, and she was in doubt how to interpret it. But as she had been in the cars, coming up from Boston, she had said: “Now, Lord, those dear friends in Burlington will want to know just what you meant by that sweet portion of your word, and I do not feel that I can tell them unless you enlighten me. What is it that is intended by the two staves in the hand of the prophet, one called Beauty and one called Bands?”

Then the dear Lord had sweetly spoken in the secret place of her heart, as distinctly as if with an audible voice: “My child, the old life of formalism, of coldness, and of worldly pleasure in which many Christians live is the staff called Bands. The higher life, the life of answered prayer, the life of perfect sanctification and fulness of blessing, is Beauty. Take this message to my dear children in Burlington.”

Oh, how simple! Oh, how sweet! Who would weary heart and brain over the interpretations of rationalistic German commentators, when we could thus have the direct interpretation of his own word by the Lord himself?

Thus Mrs. Westervelt proceeded at some length on this line, and then, with tearful eyes and an added intensity of the personal element, she rehearsed the answers to prayer which her friend, Mrs. Ingraham, had rightly called wonderful. Thus, in carrying on the work of preaching perfect sanctification in Boston, a room had been needed for meetings. Two or three of the little band had prayed, and within a week they had had a most suitable room offered them by a precious sister, but it was unfurnished. The details of securing the equipment of this room were now described. Each piece of furniture, the speaker declared, had been directly given in answer to special prayer and by a marvellous interposition. If any natural means had been at work by which persons in sympathy with their efforts were led to supply their obvious needs, these were not mentioned. Plainly it was Mrs. Westervelt’s conception of a perfect relation to God that the one sustaining it should receive constant miraculous testimony of the divine favour. The privilege of attaining this condition was presented with fervid emphasis. It was the high and perfect life! Who would live on the old plane when this was what God had for them? Oh, how beautiful it was to trust! Why should we ever doubt, when we were so plainly told that whatsoever we ask we shall receive?

As Mrs. Westervelt went on, many of her hearers were moved to tears, and a continuous response of sympathetic looks and subdued exclamations followed her recital of her surprising experiences. The wealthy women present felt that this was certainly a fine thing for those who could not get what they wanted by ordinary business methods, but were, perhaps, secretly glad that they were not themselves called upon to test their relation to God quite so pointedly. The poorer and humbler guests wept profusely, thinking how long they had stumbled on in the dull and inferior practice of working painfully for many needed things, which might all have been miraculously given them, if they had only been favourites of God, like Mrs. Westervelt, or, as she would have said, “had only just stepped out into the fulness.”

Anna Mallison sat and listened in unspeakable astonishment.

This was as absolutely new a gospel to her as the gospel of Christ to a disciple of Buddha. It was her first contact with sentimental religion.

The God of her father had been the immutable and eternal Creator, the high and holy One inhabiting eternity, the Judge of all the earth. Through the Incarnation the just anger of this Holy Being toward sinful men had been appeased. But although in Christ there had been found access to God and an Intercessor, never had it entered into the heart of Samuel Mallison or those whom he led to regard themselves as occupying a position other than of deepest humility, self-distrust, awe, and reverence.

Mrs. Westervelt’s phraseology was almost like a foreign tongue to Anna. The constant use of terms of familiar endearment in speaking of the Almighty; the application of affectionate and flattering adjectives on all sides; the sense of a peculiar and intimate relation established between herself and God; and the free-and-easy conversational, in fact, rather colloquial, style in which she held herself privileged to communicate with him,—were almost amazing to her. And beneath all these superficial marks of a new cult, lay the deeper sense of the inherent disparity. Religion to Anna had been, it has been said earlier, a system of prohibitions, of self-denials, of self-abasement, with only at rare intervals the illumination of a profound sense of the love of God. Here was a religion which held up a species of luxurious spiritual enjoyment, of unrestrained freedom in approaching God, of an indubitable sense of being personally on the best of terms with him, as the privilege of all true believers.

The conception of prayer which Mrs. Westervelt had demonstrated was not less surprising to Anna. She knew that there were wide and sweeping scriptural promises with regard to prayer, but she had always felt a deep mystery attaching itself to them. For herself, she had never ventured to intrude her temporal gratifications and designs upon the attention of her God, but had rather felt a sober silence regarding these things to best befit a sinful creature coming before a holy Creator. Half revolting, but half smitten with compunction, the thought now flashed through her mind that, if she had only prayed after this new sort, her father might have received the oranges for which he had sorely longed in the months before his death. This luxury was not to be obtained in Haran, and had therefore been patiently foregone, heaven and Burlington having seemed equally inaccessible at the time.

Mrs. Westervelt sat down, and the meeting broke up, a swarm of enthusiastic, tearful women rushing to surround her and pour out their effusive appreciation of her wonderful address. Anna stood bewildered and alone, doubting within herself. Had it all been the highest consecration, as it undoubtedly desired to be? or had it been the highest presumption, the old temptation of spiritual pride, assuming a new guise?

Two clergymen of the city, who had been attentive listeners during the whole evening, not being moved to pour out their admiration upon either speaker, quietly strayed across the hall into Mr. Ingraham’s library. The senator himself was absent.

“Well, Nichols,” said Dr. Harvey, the older man, who had a shrewd, kindly, smooth-shaven face, “what do you think of that for Old Testament exegesis?”

“It was pretty stiff to have the responsibility for it given to the Lord,” returned his friend. “I almost felt like interrupting her to say that, with all due respect, the Lord never told her any such thing, her interpretation being monstrously untrue.”

“It was awful, simply awful,” said the other, with slow emphasis. “Such fantastic tricks before high heaven might make men, as well as angels, weep. And then her familiarity with the Lord, Nichols,—why, man, she positively patronized the Almighty!”

“It is true, and yet, do you know, Doctor, that woman has some extraordinary elements for success in such work?”

“If she hadn’t, she would be of no importance, my dear fellow. She has a fine homiletic instinct. That is just where the danger lies. But, after all, she represents only one danger—there are others. She is simply the modern mystic—a kind of latter-day, diluted Madame Guyon. Too much of the thing is a trifle nauseous, perhaps, but it represents the revolt of devout souls, in every age, from formalism, and is inevitably an excess, like all revolt. Doubtless there will be such revolt, world without end, and it will have its uses.”

“It was fairly pathetic to see how eagerly those women rushed forward to receive her; evidently that’s the message they are pining for. They don’t go for us that way, Doctor.”

“No; and they didn’t for that first speaker, Mallison’s daughter. I knew him. Poor man, what a mystic he might have made, if he had let himself go! This girl is much like him—the old New England type; religion with all colour and sentiment clean purged out of it. Cold as ice, chaste as snow, the antipodes of the Guyon-Westervelt danger. Talk of holiness,—poor Mallison,—he was the holiest man I ever knew, and in this life the least rewarded,” and the old clergyman shook his head with a mournful smile.

“I fancied, when I heard her speak, although I had no idea who she was, that this daughter of his had not exactly revelled in the luxury of religion.”

“No; but I tell you, Nichols, she is none the worse for that, at her age. There is a hardihood, an unconscious, sturdy fortitude in that earlier type, which we mightily need in the world to-day. To me, that girl was positively beautiful, because—notice what I say, Nichols—she is absolutely true.”

“Very likely.”

“Yes; but when you have thought it over, tell me, some day, how many men and women you know of whom you can say that. If you know one, you will do well.”

Dr. Harvey, as he said these words, rose to leave the library, but stopped and stood, as there appeared at that moment at the hall door the figure of a man who was apparently passing through the hall. So silent and so sudden was his coming, and so singular his aspect, that the younger of the two men, perceiving him, started violently in involuntary surprise, and was conscious of a disagreeable sensation along the course of his veins.

This man, who had approached the door with noiseless steps, might have been young, or might have been old. He was of unusual height, with narrow shoulders, short body, and disproportionate length of limb. His face, an elongated oval, was of as smooth surface as that of a woman, and of the shape and pale even colour of an egg. The enormous forehead, the eyes, small and narrow, set wide apart and obliquely, the flattened nose, the straight, wide, almost lipless mouth, combined with an expression of crafty complacence to give the man a singularly alien semblance. As he stood, he smiled slowly, a smile which emphasized both the craftiness and the complacency of his expression, and remarked in a high, thin voice:—

“Just going, Doctor? Make yourself at home here, that’s all right.”

He carried a rather large, morocco-bound note-book in one hand, and a silver pencil-case in the other. His hands were extremely delicate and white, with sinuous, flexible fingers, of such phenomenal length as to suggest an extra, simian joint. They conveyed to the young clergyman a sense of expressing the same craft as the face, and a yet more palpable cruelty. The unpleasant impression became more pronounced, for, seeing the hands, young Nichols involuntarily shivered.

Probably this fact was not noticed by the newcomer, but, having thus spoken and smiling one more chilling smile, he passed on to the other end of the hall.

Eyes rather than voice asked in astonishment, “Who is that?”

“Oliver Ingraham, the senator’s son,” was the elder clergyman’s reply, as they left the library together, “the son of his first wife.” Dr. Harvey was Mrs. Ingraham’s pastor.

“Incredible!” cried the other, under his breath. “I never saw him, never heard of his existence.”

The other shook his head with gravely troubled look.

“He is only here when it becomes impossible to keep him elsewhere.”

“Is he insane? imbecile? what is he?”

“Not the first, not the second. I cannot answer the third question.”

An October morning, and breakfast-time in the Ingraham household. Great doors stood open into the dining room, where the vast round table could be seen with its glittering array of silver, and the grace and colour of exquisite flowers.

A slender girl, as graceful and charming in her simple morning dress as the flowers she had just placed on the table, stood in the doorway, waiting, a shade of impatience on her face. Behind her, at one of the dining-room windows, stood Oliver Ingraham, her half-brother. Mrs. Ingraham, with her other daughters, one older, one younger, were in the adjoining library. Outside, in the hall, a man paced up and down with impatience which he did not attempt to conceal. This was Mr. Ingraham himself, a man of good height, fine, erect figure, and youthful energy of motion and bearing. His hair was grey, as also his heavy mustache and imperial; his eyes grey also, keen, clear, but inclined to wander with disconcerting swiftness; he had a high, beaklike nose, and a fine, carefully kept skin, in which a network of dark red veins betrayed the high liver. He was at once peremptory and gracious, military and courtly, a man of the world and of affairs on a large scale.

With watch in hand he entered the library and approached his wife.

“Cornelia,” he said, smiling with good-tempered sarcasm, “does it strike you that the show is a little late in opening? I dislike to mention it, but it is already ten minutes past eight. I am not familiar with the social customs of Abyssinia, nor even of Macedonia, but in the United States it is considered good form for guests, albeit lions, to come to breakfast on time. Even the Hyrcan tiger, I understand, is usually prompt in his attendance on that function—”

“Papa!” cried his youngest daughter, Louise, “you are perfectly dreadful.”

Mrs. Ingraham looked up into her husband’s face with her mild, conciliating smile.

“I am so sorry, Justin,” she said softly, “but I suppose the poor dear creatures are very tired after the meeting last night, and their journey, and all—”

There was a slight noise on the stairs as she spoke, and Mr. Ingraham faced about with military precision to receive in succession a number of ladies, who filed into the room, and were warmly greeted and promptly presented to him by his wife. Two were visitors from New York, substantial “Board women”; other two, returned missionaries from Japan; the last to enter was a shy, brown little person with soft dark eyes, a native Hindu, who could only communicate with her host by a gentle, pleading smile. All were in attendance on a great missionary conference held in Burlington that week, drawing its supporters from all New England and New York.

“Shall we go to breakfast, Cornelia?” Mr. Ingraham asked, having infused sudden courage into the trembling breast of the little native by his gallant attention. “Are we all here?”

“Why, no, papa,” interposed his youngest daughter; “we must wait for Mr. Burgess.”

“Mr. Burgess?” repeated her father, in a musing tone. “I do not recall that I have met him. Is the gentleman an invalid?”

“At least the gentleman is here, papa,” murmured Louise, directing his attention to a young man who at the moment entered the room, and approached Mrs. Ingraham with a few words of courteous apology.

Meeting him, Mr. Ingraham saw a slender, youthful figure, somewhat below the average of masculine height, a man of delicate physique, perhaps five and twenty years old, with a serious, sensitive face, and earnest blue eyes looking out through glasses; a young man who presented himself with quiet self-possession, and bore the unmistakable marks of good breeding.

As they took their places around the breakfast table, Keith Burgess, for this was the young man’s name, found himself seated opposite Oliver, with whom he was not drawn to converse, and between the second Miss Ingraham and the little Aroona-bia. Conversation with the latter being necessarily of an extremely limited nature, her gentle lisping of “yes” and “thank you” being somewhat indiscriminate, the guest found himself shortly occupied exclusively with his very pretty neighbour.

“You know, Mr. Burgess,” she was presently saying, “I almost feel that I know you already.”

“How so?” asked Keith, simply. It was plain that, although accustomed to the refinements of life, this was not a man accomplished in social subtleties. There was, in fact, a curiously unworldly expression in the young fellow’s eyes, and somewhat of thoughtful introspection.

“Why, you see mamma and some of her friends who heard you speak last spring have told us so much about you.”

Keith bowed slightly, without reply.

“And you can’t think, Mr. Burgess, how delighted we are to have you come to Burlington. We were so afraid you would leave for the East before we could hear you, and I assure you that would have been a great disappointment. I think you sail in the spring, do you not?”

“Yes, in May, as soon as I graduate.”

“And it is for India?”

“I suppose so. It is not fully determined, but that would be my choice, and I believe the Board incline that way.”

The pretty Miss Ingraham, whose name was Gertrude, sighed a very little.

“It is all so wonderful, so almost incredible, to me that any one young and like other people, don’t you know? can really go,” she said gently. “There are people to whom it seems perfectly natural. Mamma has a new protÉgÉe who is to go out as a missionary teacher a year from this fall. She is very young, only twenty-one, and we all think she is lovely; but still, for her it seems really the only thing to be expected. She has the genuine missionary air already, and you would know she could not be anything else, somehow.”

Keith looked civilly, but not keenly, interested.

“I wonder if it is any one I have heard of,” he remarked. “It is our Board that sends her?”

“Yes. Her name is Mallison, Anna Mallison. Her father was a country minister up in the mountainous part of the state. Poor thing! She will find India quite a change after Vermont winters, I should think.”

“An improvement, perhaps,” said Keith, smiling. “But really, Miss Ingraham, going back to what you said a moment ago, why should it seem so incredible for a man who has devoted himself to the service of God, truly and unreservedly, to be willing to go where what little he can do is most needed? Many men go to foreign countries and remain the better part of their lives for business purposes: men in the navy; Englishmen, of course, of social and political ambitions, by hundreds. Do you ever feel that there is anything extraordinary or superhuman in what they do?”

Gertrude Ingraham was looking at the young man with almost devout attention.

“No,” she answered, shaking her head with pretty humility, seeing which way he led.

“Then why,” pursued Keith Burgess, leaning over to look steadily in her face with his earnest eyes, and lowering his voice to a deeper emphasis, “why do you wonder that now and then a man should be willing to do for the Lord Jesus Christ and the salvation of souls what a hundred men do as a matter of course for their own selfish ambition and the gaining of money?”

The girl looked down, the brightness of her face softened by serious feeling.

“The only wonder, Miss Ingraham, is that so few do it. For my own part I do not see how a fellow who goes into the ministry, as things are now, can do anything else,” and Keith turned back to his neglected breakfast. Thereafter he was drawn into conversation, across the mute languor of the little Hindu, with his host, who had questions to ask regarding Fulham, which had been his college.

At four o’clock that afternoon, Keith Burgess, sitting in a large congregation in Dr. Harvey’s stately church, listening with consciously declining interest to a long statistical report which was being read from the pulpit, felt himself touched on the shoulder. Looking up he saw the Rev. Frank Nichols, pastor of a mission church in the city. He had known him well in college, a clear-eyed, well set-up young cleric. Nichols invited him by a word and look to follow him, and together they quietly left the assembly.

When they had reached the street and the crisp autumn air, Keith shook himself with a motion of relief.

“Is there anything more tiresome than such a succession of meetings?” he exclaimed. “Shall we walk? I am in a hurry to climb one of these hills.”

“We must do it later,” returned Nichols; “but if you are not too tired I want to take you down this street and on a block or two to my church. The women are having a meeting there this afternoon.”

“Oh, yes, I remember; but will it be in order for us to intrude?”

“Yes, that will be all right. The brethren drop in quietly now and then, and are welcome. You needn’t stay long, for you are tired, I know by your face; but I tell you what it is, Burgess, I want you to hear Anna Mallison.”

Anna Mallison! again that name which he had heard in the morning. It began to have a strangely musical quality to Keith’s ears.

“I have heard her name. She is under appointment, I believe. A good speaker?”

“No, not a particularly good speaker, but, as Dr. Harvey once said to me, an absolutely true nature. She is a young woman of strong personality, but singularly destitute of the desire to impress herself, and with a certain touch of the unconsciously heroic about her which you feel but cannot describe. I have never met a girl of precisely her type before, myself, and I am curious to know what you will think of her.”

Entering the small, unpretentious church, Nichols and his friend sat down in the first row of seats, next to the central aisle. The room was nearly full; several women were upon the platform, from which the pulpit had been removed. One woman was speaking in a high-keyed, plaintive voice.

It was not a stable or quiet audience; some were leaving their seats, others coming in, many turning their heads to catch glimpses of expected friends. Behind the young men came in two girls who remained standing close beside them in the aisle for a little space. One of these girls had pretty, fair hair and peachy cheeks; she was dressed in deep blue with touches of gilt cord and buttons, giving a kind of coquettish military jauntiness to her appearance. She wore a small round hat, of dark blue, which set off her pretty hair charmingly. Her manner was full of quick, eager animation; she smiled much and whispered to her companion continually. This companion stood motionless and unresponsive to the frequent appeals made to her, a quiet face and figure, a dress and bonnet of plain and unadorned black, ill suited to her youth; but it was her face and figure rather than the other to which Keith Burgess found his attention riveted. He knew intuitively, before Nichols told him, that this was Anna Mallison; but without this knowledge he felt that he must still have kept his eyes upon her face. The repose of it, the purity and elevation of the look, the serene, serious sweetness, were what he had seen in the faces of angels men have dreamed of rather than of women they have loved. But that she was after all a woman, with a woman’s sensitiveness and impressibility, he fancied was manifest when, having perhaps felt his look resting thus intently on her face, Anna turned and their eyes met in an instant’s direct, uninterrupted gaze, whereupon a deep flush rose and spread over the clear brown pallor of her face, and she turned, and bent to speak to her friend, as if to cover a slight confusion.

The friend was Mally Loveland, and she was finding her position a particularly satisfactory one at the moment, being aware that Mr. Nichols was so placed as to take in the best points of her new fall costume in a side view. It was for him, not for Anna, that she had been using so much of nervous energy in the last few minutes.

A lady who had left the platform for the purpose now came down the aisle, and, taking Anna Mallison by the hand with a word of welcome, conducted her to the front of the church. Mally, thus left alone, fluttered into a place made for her, seeming to discover Mr. Nichols as she turned, and smiling surprise and pleasure upon him.

Just before Anna began to address the gathering, while a hymn was sung, Keith Burgess quietly made his way to a seat near the front of the church, at the side of the platform. He had excused himself to Nichols, who had then asked and obtained permission to sit beside Mally, an incident productive of a vast amount of conscious and fluttering delight on the part of that young lady.

The austerity of Anna Mallison’s religious life had, under the influence of Mrs. Westervelt and her disciple, Mrs. Ingraham, relaxed within a few months to a marked degree. New conceptions of a relation of joyful assurance, of conscious acceptance with God, had risen within her, with the perception that religion was not exclusively prohibition, and conscience its only energy. Something of warmth and brightness had been infused into her chill, colourless, outward life, furthermore, by the intercourse with the Ingrahams which had followed her first visit. She was still in a manner ice-bound in her interior life and in her capacity for expression, but the ice was beginning to yield and here and there to break up a little.

Thus, in the manner with which she spoke on this occasion, there was something of gentleness, and a less uncompromising self-restraint than when she had first spoken before an audience. She was still noticeably reserved, still innocent of the orator’s arts, or of conscious seeking to produce an effect; she still delivered herself of her simple message as if it were a duty to be discharged rather than an opportunity to be grasped. But through the coldness of all this neutrality there pierced now and then a ray of the radiant purity and loftiness of the girl’s inner nature, and this time those who heard her did not pity or patronize her in their thoughts.

Keith Burgess watched her from the place he had chosen. Her tall, meagre figure in its nunlike dress was sharply outlined against a palely tinted window opposite, through which the October sun shone. She stood without support of table or desk, her hands falling straight at her sides, and looked directly at the people she addressed, fearless, since burdened with the sense of immortal destinies, not with a consciousness of herself. Keith noted the hand which fell against the straight black folds of her dress; its fine shape and delicate texture alone expressed her ladyhood. She could not have been called pretty, but her face thus seen in profile was almost beautiful, the hollowness of the cheeks and the stringent thinness of all the contours being less obvious.

But Keith Burgess was not occupied with Anna’s face and figure to any serious degree. He knew instinctively that she was of good birth and breeding; he saw that, though severe and angular in person and manner, she was womanly, noble, refined. He divined, as no one could have failed to divine, the essential truth and purity of her nature. From her simple, unfeigned utterance he perceived the high earnestness and consecration with which she was entering upon missionary labour. Perceiving all those things, the young man looked and listened with a sudden, momentous question taking swift shape in his mind.

He remained until the close of the meeting and met Anna, introducing himself, as he preferred doing. She received his few expressions of satisfaction in hearing her with scant response, and apparently with neither surprise or gratification. He did not like her the less for that.

The Ingrahams found Keith sober and preoccupied at dinner that night, but, as he was to be chief speaker at the evening session of the convention, they thought this natural and in order. He was liked and was treated with especial consideration by them all, and even Mr. Ingraham did him the honour of going to the church to hear him speak. He had no sympathy with his wife’s penchant for missions, but he thought Burgess was “a nice little fellow,” and he wanted to see what kind of a speech he could make.

The different members of the family and their guests came home one after another late in the evening, and, as they met, exchanged enthusiastic expressions concerning the eloquence of Keith Burgess. Mrs. Ingraham and the Board ladies thought the dear young man had a wonderful gift; Aroona-bia smiled tenderly in assent; the girls said he was simply perfect; and Mr. Ingraham admitted that, when he had worked off some of his “sophomoric effervescence,” he might make a good deal of an orator, and added, under his breath, it was nothing less than a crime to send a delicate, talented boy like that to make food for those barbarians, whose souls weren’t worth the sacrifice, even if he could save them, which he couldn’t.

“Very true, dear,” rejoined his wife; “no man can save another’s soul; he can only lead him to the dear Lord’s feet.”

The senator bit short a sharp reply, and just then Keith himself appeared, looking pale and exhausted, deprecating wearily the praise they were eager to bestow upon him, and begging to be excused if he withdrew at once to his room.

As the sound of his footsteps was lost in the hall above, Mrs. Ingraham said:—

“I am sorry Mr. Burgess was so tired. I invited Anna Mallison to come here for the night, and I wanted him to meet her. Mrs. Churchill has asked the opportunity for a little talk with Anna in the morning, and it will be convenient for her to be here. It is so far to her rooms, you know.”

“I should think the house was full already, mamma,” remarked Gertrude Ingraham. “Where can we put her?”

“Oh, she will not mind going up to the south room in the third story, my dear. I told Jane to have it in order.”

Just then Miss Ingraham came into the house and Anna Mallison was with her.

In a few moments after he had reached his room Keith Burgess heard a knock at his door. Opening it, he found a neat, white-capped maid who bore a tray; entering demurely, she placed it upon a small table, remarking that Mrs. Ingraham thought he would need refreshment. The tray held an exquisite china service for one person, a pot of chocolate, and delicate rolls and cakes.

“Miss Gertrude said I was to light your fire,” the maid said, proceeding to remove the fender and strike a match for the purpose.

“Very well,” replied Keith, walking to the other side of the room. The night air was sharp, and he liked the notion.

A moment later the maid withdrew, with the noiseless, unobtrusive step and movement of the well-trained servant, and Keith, when he turned, found the room already enlivened by the firelight. The table was drawn to a cosey corner on the hearth-rug, a deep cushioned easy-chair beside it. The fragrant steam of the hot chocolate rose invitingly, and as Keith threw himself with a long sigh of comfort into the chair, he detected another fragrance, and perceived, lying upon the plate, a single rose, and around the stem a slip of white paper. On the paper, Keith found a few words written: “You must let me thank you for the great uplift you have given me to-night. Gertrude Ingraham.”

The young man, rising, put the flower in a clean glass vase on his mantle, and the note in the inner compartment of his writing-case, touching both with careful gentleness. Then, returning to the fireside, he fell to drinking and eating with cordial satisfaction in all this creature comfort; but as he ate and drank and grew warm, he was thinking steadily.

He was not minded to flatter himself unduly, but what was he justified in inferring from Gertrude’s action and from other small signs which he had seen? Simply, that she liked him; honoured him above his due; probably idealized him; possibly, if he sought her deeper regard, might respond.

He liked her thoroughly. What man would not? She was very pretty, and her beauty was enhanced by faultless dress,—no small thing in itself. Her manners were charming, with the charm of a sweet nature, aided by the polish of high social intercourse; she had the thousand little nameless, flattering graces of the woman, who, old or young, instinctively knows how to put a man at his best. Furthermore, Keith was not insensible to the background against which this girl was set. The aristocratic, powerful family connection, the magnificent home, the wealth and grace and ease of life, the fine manners and habits of thought and conduct belonging to the Ingrahams, were not matters of naught to him. He liked all these things. What was more, he knew perfectly that there was no element of temptation in them to lead him from his chosen path of altruism; Mrs. Ingraham’s well-known missionary ardour and Gertrude’s delicate sympathy were guarantee for that. They understood perfectly that within six months he would depart for an exile of perhaps a lifetime, in an alien and uncongenial land, where he would work under conditions of life repulsive and depressing to the last degree. Nevertheless, he believed without vanity that Gertrude Ingraham, knowing all, foreseeing all, could care for him.

Keith Burgess had come, suddenly perhaps, but definitely, to the conclusion that he wanted a wife; and, furthermore, that he wanted a wife who would go out with him to India six months hence. Consequently, as he sat by the fire which Gertrude Ingraham had lighted for him, he pursued this line of thought with significant persistence.

A curious condition, however, attended his reflections. While he sat by Gertrude’s fire, tasted her dainty food, inhaled the fragrance of the rose she had sent him, and thought of her in all her beauty and grace, he did not see her. Instead of her figure, there stood constantly before the eye of his mind the tall, austere form of Anna Mallison, in the unsoftened simplicity of her manner and apparel, and in her passionless, unresponding repose. He thought of Gertrude Ingraham, but he saw Anna Mallison.

She had travelled the way that he had come. Outwardly there might be coldness between them, but inwardly there must be the profoundest basis of sympathy. The same master conviction had won and held their two souls. He could not have known her better, it seemed to him, had he known her all his life. The things which would have repelled another man were what drew him all the more to her. It was not the passion of love which had so suddenly awakened within him, but a mighty longing for what Keith Burgess had thus far gone through life without,—a true and satisfying sympathy with his religious life and its aspirations. A girl like Gertrude Ingraham might accept his religion and the shape it took, but it would be because she cared for him; a girl like Anna Mallison might, perhaps, accept him, but it would be because of his religion and the shape it had taken. At this crisis of his life the enthusiasm for his calling ruled him as no human love could, and by it all the issues of life must stand or fall.

Hours passed. The fire died out to a core of dull red embers, the single rose drooped on its stem, the tray of food stood despoiled and indifferent; the words of the small white paper were forgotten, and Keith Burgess, throwing himself upon his knees, prayed thus to God:—

“Oh, my Lord, if thou wilt grant me so great a good as to win her for my wife, if thou wilt bless me in seeking her, if it is according to thy will that our lives should be united, and that together we should carry the cross of Christ to the lost, grant me, O Lord, a sign. But if it be not thy will, make this, too, known to me. Thy will I seek, O my God, in this, in all things.”

Then, being wearied in brain and body, he slept heavily until morning.

When, just before the breakfast hour, Keith stepped into the hall, he paused a moment, hearing a step on the stairs above him leading from the third story rooms. He advanced slowly to the head of the next staircase, and not until he reached it did he see who it was descending from above. Then, lifting his eyes, he saw Anna Mallison.

Her presence in this house, at this hour, so surprising, so unlooked-for, so almost unnatural, since her home was elsewhere in the city—what did it mean? It was the sign he had craved. How else could he interpret it?

The blood rushed in sudden flow to his heart, leaving his face colourless.

Anna, not being surprised to meet him thus, was simply saying “Good morning,” and passing down the stairs. Keith put out his hand and stopped her going.

So marvellous did her presence seem to him that he forthwith spoke out with unconventional directness the thought in his mind.

“I think you do not know just what it means that you are here, in this house, this morning.”

Mally Loveland would have flashed some pert rejoinder to a comment like this; Gertrude Ingraham, in a similar situation, would have looked at Keith Burgess with pretty wonder and smiling question.

Anna Mallison, seeing the pallor and emotion of his face, and having become wonted to the supernatural interpretation of the small events of human life, only said gravely and without obvious surprise:—

“I do not, perhaps, know all that it means. I trust it means no trouble to any one—to you.”

“No,” he answered, a slight tremor in his voice; “I cannot believe that it does. You came under the divine leading, no matter how or why you seemed to yourself to come. You came as a sign. I had asked a sign of God. I did not dream of your presence in this house. Seeing you now, so unexpectedly, how can I doubt any further? It is the will of God.”

Anna looked straight into Keith’s face, a deep shadow of perplexity on her own, but she did not speak.

He smiled slightly.

“You cannot understand, and no wonder, I am speaking to you as I have no right to—in the dark. It is for you to say whether, by and by, before I go to-morrow morning, I may explain my meaning and try to make clear to you what is so clear to me.”

It was Anna now who grew perturbed, for the significance of his words, although veiled, was manifest. She turned and descended the stairs without speaking, Keith Burgess following her in silence. She did not herself understand her own sharp recoil and dismay, but all the maiden instinct of defence was in alarm within her.

At the foot of the stairs they both paused for an instant, and Keith asked in a low voice:—

“Will you walk with me on these hills somewhere, alone, this afternoon at four o’clock?”

A sudden great sense of revolt arose in the girl’s heart, and broke in a faint sob upon her lips. She did not want to walk on the hills with him—with any man. She did not want to hear what he had to say. But he had said it was the will of God, their thus meeting. He had sought that awful, irrefragable will, and she had acted, it seemed, in obedience to it in coming to this house. What was she, to be found fighting against God?

She felt herself constrained to say yes.

... I made answer to my friend: “Of a surety I have now set my feet on that point of life beyond the which he must not pass who would return.”

“I ask you, Anna Mallison, to go out with me to my work in India in May, as my wife.”

Thus Keith Burgess, having recounted the story of the lights and leadings of the past twenty-four hours.

They were standing, and faced one another in a yellow beech wood where the sky above their heads was shut out by the sun-lightened paving of the clustering leaves.

As she came down the woodland path Anna had broken off a long stem of goldenrod, and she held it hung like an inverted torch at her side, like a sad vestal virgin at some ancient funeral rites.

“Forgive me for bringing this to you so swiftly. I know it seems hasty, perhaps unreasonably so. But to me no time or acquaintance, however extended, could change my wish. And, you see, my time is so very short, now!”

Keith Burgess looked with his whole soul’s sincerity into Anna’s face, and the integrity of his purpose, of his whole nature, could not be mistaken.

“It is not the suddenness, I think,” she replied slowly, with unconscious coldness; “like you, I feel that the great facts of God’s will and providence may be made clear to us instantly.”

Then she hesitated and paused.

“Please go on,” the young man said gently.

“It is only,” she answered, with a pathos which a woman would have understood, “that I did not want to be married at all. I had never thought of it as being a thing I needed to be troubled about.”

Keith Burgess smiled faintly at her frankness, which was not cruel of intention, he knew, but his smile touched Anna’s heart.

“I did not wish to trouble you,” he said quietly.

“Please do not misunderstand me. It was not the way to express it—my words sounded unkind, I am afraid. I should learn better ways of gentler speaking. Other women seem to have them naturally.”

“I like it that you are honest, even if it hurts,” said Keith, steadily.

“I did not mean that you trouble me—not exactly. Only that my life looked so plain and clear to me, and this is so surprising—it seems to change things so.”

“Only by a little outward difference. I should not dare to ask you to go as my wife if I did not believe that you could work more effectively so, perhaps,” he added timidly, “even more happily, if I had strength and protection to give you, and a home of some sort, however poor, in that strange land.”

Something in the quality of his voice brought swift tears to Anna’s eyes. It was so new to have some one thinking and caring for her ease and happiness. It had so long been her part to do this for others, to forget herself, and take it quite for granted that others should forget her.

He saw his advantage, and sought to follow it.

“The thought of marriage is unwelcome to you,” he said earnestly, “because it is foreign and unfamiliar. I think you are very different from most girls of your age, and have lived a different inward life, higher and purer, and free from personal aims in a wonderful way. But even so, regarding marriage I believe you are wrong. You think of it as an interruption, almost as a decline from the life you had meant to live. On the contrary, God has made it to be the very best life, the normal and fulfilled life, in which each is at the strongest and best. Where my work for God and men might fall utterly to the ground, you, by your purer insight, might help me to make it availing; and perhaps the poor service I could give might help a little to carry forward your work.”

Anna lifted her hand in a slight, expressive gesture.

“Look at the whole thing a moment,” cried Keith, with sudden boldness, “as if you were not you and I not I. Here are two persons, man and woman, of the same age within two or three years, led of the same Spirit to the same purpose and consecration and calling; both ready to go out to the same unknown land, lonely and apart, and there to work as best they may far from any human being they have ever seen or known. Such were we. And now God, looking upon us, sees that each needs the other, and in his good providence he leads us here to this place. I see you, and instantly my heart goes out to you as the companion, the other self, I need. My soul recognizes in you its counterpart. God, in answer to my prayer that he will make known his will, suddenly, most unexpectedly, as I start on the new day, brings you before me before I have spoken or met with man or woman, as the first, best light of morning. What does God mean? Ask yourself, Anna Mallison, ask him. For my own part, I cannot doubt his will. I have no right to thrust my conviction upon you forcibly, but to me this is as clearly the call of God as my call to the foreign field or to the divine service.”

They were still standing face to face, and while Keith spoke Anna looked into his eyes with the serious directness of one listening to an argument of weighty but impersonal import. With all his conviction and earnestness, he was as passionless as she, save for his religious passion. A strange wooing!

Anna turned now and walked on along the mossy path in silence.

“Take time to consider,—all the time you need. Do not try to decide now,” said Keith, walking at her side. She made no reply; in fact, she did not realize that he spoke. Her mind was working in intense concentration.

Keith Burgess alone she would have turned away without a moment’s doubt, but he had, or seemed to have, a mighty Ally. She did not fear him in rejecting nor desire him in accepting, but to reject God!—that she feared; to accept God in every manifestation of his will was her deepest desire.

But what if Keith were wrong in his conviction? Her pale face flushed with a flame of indignation as she thought of it, that a man, whom she had never met or known, sought or desired, could suddenly invade the very citadel of her will, and summon her to surrender her very life into his keeping, in the great Name, when, perhaps, he was self-deceived, was coming in his own name, to do his own will. She looked aside at Keith’s face as he walked by her, in sudden distrust. It wore no flush of passion, and in the blue eyes was the light less of earthly love than of heavenly. It was a look pure and high, such as a man might fitly wear as he approached the sacrament. A sudden awe fell upon Anna, as if she were looking upon one who had talked with God, and her eyes fell, the lashes weighted with heavy, unshed tears.

“He is better than I,” she thought; “a man like this could not lead me wrong.”

White and cold, and with a strange sinking at her heart, she turned to him soon, and stopped where she stood.

He looked into her face, his own suffused with emotion. She held out both her hands, the goldenrod, which she had held until now, falling to the ground. Keith Burgess took them in both his, and Anna felt that his hands trembled far more than did her own.

“I believe you were right,” she said simply. “It is the will of God.”

He kissed her then on her brow and on her lips, the salutation disturbing her no more than if he had been her brother.

“Please, will you let me go home now, alone, Mr. Burgess?” she asked humbly, like a child.

Keith was disappointed, but consented at once.

“Only,” he said, “you should not call me Mr. Burgess. My name for you is Keith.”

“Not yet,” she answered. “In outward things and ways remember, please, that we are perfect strangers. It is only in the spirit that we have met.”

Then she left him, and Keith Burgess stood watching the tall, dark figure swiftly receding down the wood walk in the yellow light. His look was wistful. He longed to go after her, but he forebore.

Anna hastened down into the city streets and to the hospital where she was on duty every afternoon. There was plenty of work awaiting her, and not for a moment was she free or left alone to think her own thoughts. Six o’clock found her back in her own rooms at Mrs. Wilson’s. They were low and dull after the fine spaciousness of the Ingraham house, but that was a matter of little note to Anna.

Mally was there with a friend whom she had brought home with her to tea. Anna washed the dishes while these two diligently revised the trimming of their hats which in some particular, wholly imperceptible to Anna’s untrained eye, fell below the standard of latest fashion.

It was not until the girls left the house, at seven o’clock, and all her duties, trivial and homely and wearying, were done, that Anna, alone at last, could yield to the overpowering weariness which was upon her.

She carried the lamp, whose flame seemed to pierce her aching eyes, into the next room, and then, lying on the hard haircloth sofa with her head propped on one hand, she closed her eyes, thankful at last to be where she could let a few tears fall with no one to wonder or question. The quiet patience inbred in the constitution of the girl’s nature controlled her mood; there was no struggle of revolt from the vow she had taken and the future to which she had pledged herself, but an unspeakable homesickness had taken possession of her. She liked and reverenced Keith Burgess, no doubt she would love him very truly by and by, but just now he seemed to have turned her out of her own life and to have taken control where she had hitherto, with God, been supreme. It all gave her the same feeling she had suffered when, after her father’s death, they had been obliged to give up their home for the coming in of a new leader for the little flock her father had led so long. She knew there was no real analogy between the two experiences, she could reason clearly against herself, but she could not control the piteous heart-sickness which settled down upon her in the dim room, in the silent, empty house.

Many women have suffered a reaction like this in the hour of committing themselves, from the fear that this is not the supreme love, the love of the lifetime; the misgiving lest this man is not, after all, the man for whom they can forsake all others and unto whom they can cleave with a perfect heart to the end. These were not, however, the considerations which weighed upon Anna Mallison. It was, as she had herself expressed it, very simply, that she had not thought about marriage at all. She had no ideal of manhood in her mind from this point of view. It was not that she craved the love of a stronger man or a man abler or better in any way than Keith Burgess; she merely preferred no man. She had not awakened to love; the deeper forces of her woman’s nature were sleeping still.

But there was not for an instant, in Anna’s mind, the thought of withdrawing from her plighted word to Keith. She believed that he had come to her, as he believed, under the divine light and leading. She turned to walk in the new path marked out for her, faithfully and obediently, but pausing a moment to look with aching eyes and heart down the dear, familiar path which she was leaving. But Anna was too tired to think long, or even to feel, and so fell asleep shortly, in the stiff, angular position in which she lay, the tears undried upon her cheeks. The sound of the knocker on the house door, hard, metallic, but without resonance, suddenly roused her, and she sprang up hastily, remembering that Mrs. Wilson had gone to the great missionary meeting, and that she was alone in the house.

She took her lamp and went down the narrow stairs into the bit of entry. When she opened the door, Keith Burgess himself was standing there.

He looked at her, smiling half mischievously, and she felt a sudden warmth at her heart as she met the sweet, true look of his eyes.

“Didn’t you ever expect to see me again?” he said, and laughed as he stepped into the house and closed the door.

She smiled, too, and held out her hand. He took it and kissed it in a gallant way, which she found wholly wonderful, being quite unused to such feats, and unread in romances.

“It will be a bore, won’t it,” he went on quaintly, “this having a man around to bother you? Perhaps I ought not to have come, but, you see, I go in the morning, and I thought you might have something to say to me before I left.”

“Yes,” Anna said; adding naÏvely, “but where shall I take you? It is so new. I have not had a call like this before.” She felt shy about inviting him up to her own sitting room.

“In there?” he queried, pointing to the door of Mrs. Wilson’s drear little closed parlour.

“Oh, no,” replied Anna, “Mrs. Wilson never lets us go in there. It is too fine for anything but funerals and—” she was about to say weddings, but broke off confused, and they both laughed, looking at each other like two children with their innocent eyes.

“I can sit here,” said Keith, pointing, as he spoke, to the steep, narrow stairs. There was a red and green striped carpet on them, and a strip of grey linen over for protection. The little entry was bare of furniture, save for the small uncovered table on which Anna had placed her lamp.

“Very well,” she said, “I will borrow a chair from Mrs. Wilson’s kitchen;” and she forthwith brought out a clean wooden chair painted a light yellow, and placed it at the side of the stairway for herself, there being no room at the foot.

“I was going to say,” remarked Keith, musingly, as Anna sat down, “that these stairs are rather wide, and if Mrs. Wilson is particular about lending her chairs, I could make room for you here,” and he looked at her soberly between the stair-rails. Anna shook her head, but suddenly there came over them both a sense of the ludicrousness of the little scene they would have presented, had any one been able to look in upon them, and they laughed again, as Anna had not laughed since she was a child, something of exhaustion aiding to break down her wonted restraint.

“It is so funny, oh, it is so funny!” she cried, “to see you looking out between those bars as if you were a lion in a cage. Just think of the people at the meeting! What if they were to see us two. Wouldn’t they think it was dreadful?”

“Would you mind putting your hand into the cage?” asked Keith. “I assure you it is perfectly safe. This is not the man-eating variety.”

“You are sure?” Anna asked, with a woman’s instinctive coquetry swiftly developed, but giving her hand.

“It is such a beautiful hand,” he said, laying it very gently on his own right hand, which he had placed on the stair beside him, and at this, the first word of flattery which any man had ever spoken to her face, Anna blushed and grew positively pretty, as he looked at her.

All this laughing and light nonsense between them, did for her what a season of prayer and serious discussion of their situation could not have accomplished. Anna felt, with a sudden sense of comfort and release, that this new relation was not exclusively a solemn religious ordinance, but a dear human companionship, the joyousness of simple, upright hearts, and the sympathy of kindred minds.

At Anna’s earnest request, Keith Burgess consented that their engagement should be announced to no one save his mother until spring. Mally observed the regularity of Keith’s weekly letters, and attempted to tease Anna into acknowledging that there was “something in it”; but Anna’s dignity, which on occasion had its effect even upon Mally’s vivacious self-confidence, ended this line of attack in short order. A few weeks after Keith left Burlington Anna received the following note:—

My Dear Miss Mallison: My son, Keith Burgess, has confided in me the fact that you have consented to enter into an understanding with him which, if Providence should favour, will doubtless eventually terminate in marriage. Your name has been mentioned to me by members of our Woman’s Foreign Missionary Board, and I am led to believe that my dear son has been graciously led of the Lord in his choice of a companion in the path of duty upon which he has entered. That my son is a godly young man and of an amiable disposition, I need hardly take this occasion to tell you. Similarity of views and of religious experience would seem to furnish a satisfactory basis for a union productive of mutual good and the glory of God.

Trusting for further acquaintance before you depart for foreign shores,

If this letter were stiff or cold, Anna, not looking for warmth and freedom, did not miss them. She knew that Keith was the only son of his mother, and she a widow. She took it for granted that they were poor like herself; she had not known many people who were other than poor, none who were in the ranks of missionary candidates. Such a thing would have seemed singularly incongruous because unfamiliar. She had a distinct picture of Mrs. Burgess, whom she knew to be in delicate health, as a woman of sweet, saintly face and subdued manner, living in a small white cottage in an obscure street of Fulham, perhaps not unlike the Burlington street in which Mrs. Wilson’s house stood. She fancied her living alone—indeed, Keith had told her that this was so—in a plain and humble fashion, a quiet, devoted, Christian life, a type with which her experience both in Haran and Burlington church circles had made her familiar. There were some geraniums in the little sitting room window, she thought, and it was a sunny room with braided mats over the carpet, and a comfortable cat asleep on a patchwork cushion near the stove. There would be a small stand beside Mrs. Burgess’s rocking-chair with a large Bible and a volume or two of Barnes’s “Notes,” a spectacle case and a box of cough medicine; perhaps it was a bottle, Anna was not sure, but she inclined to the hoarhound drops, and almost smelt them when she thought of the room. She imagined the dear old lady carefully and prayerfully inditing the epistle to herself, and thought it most kind of her, and wrote thus to Keith.

The winter passed for Anna in hard and unintermitting work. Mally allowed herself lighter labours, and, having raised her eyes with admiration to the Rev. Frank Nichols, now shook herself free as far as she could conveniently from her more frivolous Burlington friends, and renewed her earlier interest in religion with extraordinary zeal. She felt that Dr. Harvey’s church was too worldly for her ideals, and that Mr. Nichols’s beautiful work among the humbler classes offered far more opportunity for religious devotion. Her regular attendance at all the meetings of the church was a great satisfaction to Anna, who looked on with characteristic blindness, glad to see her friend returning to a more consistent walk and conversation.

The letters which passed between Anna and Keith would hardly have been called love-letters. They dealt with religious experience and views of “divine truth,” for the most part. Not even at start or finish of any letter was place found for the endearing trifling common to lovers. This correspondence might all have been published, omitting nothing—without dashes or asterisks, even in that day when it was thought unseemly to reveal the innermost secrets of hearts, and to speak upon the housetops that which had been whispered in the ear. There were few personal allusions on the part of either, beyond Keith’s occasional mention of his health being below the mark. At Christmas Keith sent Anna a volume of “Sacred Poetry”; on the fly-leaf he had written:—

He had abstained from warmer terms on account of Anna’s wish to withhold the knowledge of their engagement for the present.

Poor Anna, having nothing wherewith to provide a gift for her lover, the small savings for her education being now nearly exhausted, made shift to sew together sheets of note-paper, on which she copied her favourite passages from Paley and Butler and various theologians. This humble offering was sent to Keith, who was highly gratified, and treasured the little gift affectionately.

For two weeks following Christmas Anna received no letter, but she was not greatly surprised, as she knew Keith was to start early in January for a tour of various New England towns, where he was expected to present the cause of Foreign Missions. He was now completing his last year in the theological seminary near Boston, and his unusual gifts in public speech induced the faculty to send him out frequently on such missions.

At half-past eight of a zero morning in the second week of January, Anna, with her threadbare black jacket buttoned tight to her throat, her arm full of books, was leaving Mrs. Wilson’s door on her way to school, when she saw a boy stop in front of the house with a telegram in his hand. Taking it, she found, greatly amazed, that it was for herself—the first telegram she had ever received.

The boy, accustomed to see people receive his messages with changing colour and nervous hands, glanced at her coolly, then turned and went his way back, plunging his hands into his pockets against the biting cold. In the little entry Anna opened the despatch. It was dated Portland, Maine, and signed by Keith Burgess. It told her that he was very ill; that he was alone, it being impossible for his mother to go to him. It asked her to come to him at once.

Anna’s mind, in the half-hour which followed, worked with intense rapidity. She found from a newspaper that by a ten o’clock train she could reach Boston that evening, and she decided to take that train, and go on to Portland by night. She wrote a note to Mally, in which she told her of her engagement to Keith and of what had occurred. She packed a satchel with what was necessary, and last of all drew out of her little square writing-desk, where she kept it carefully locked away, an envelope containing all the ready money she possessed. She found that there remained exactly twelve dollars. This, to Anna, was a large amount of money, and, although her heart sank a little at the thought of spending so much at once, the prospect for the weeks to come before she could draw upon her mother again being blank enough, she knew that this was justified by the emergency.

Soon after nine Anna again departed from the house, the books replaced by the satchel, the worn and faded black gown and jacket unchanged, starting alone and unsped upon her long and anxious journey.

She went first to the Ingrahams, walking the long mile in the sharp cold, carrying her heavy bag with a benumbed hand, since the reckless extravagance of a carriage might not for a moment be considered.

Mrs. Ingraham was ill and could not see Anna, but her daughter Gertrude came into the parlour and greeted her cordially. The issues of the hour were too strong upon Anna to permit any trace of embarrassment or personal feeling in her manner, although she felt that it would have been easier to say what she felt must be said, to Mrs. Ingraham.

“Will you be so good as to tell your mother,” she began, “that I could not go away on this journey, which I must take, without explaining it to her? She has been so very kind. We did not mean to announce it quite so soon, but Mr. Burgess, whom I met here in the fall, and I are engaged to be married.” Anna was too preoccupied to perceive the flush which slowly and steadily rose in Gertrude Ingraham’s face.

“We expect to go out together in May,” Anna proceeded. “Mr. Burgess has not been strong for several months, perhaps he is never very strong; but this morning I have a telegram from him asking me to come to Portland, as he is very ill, and his mother cannot be with him.”

“Shall you go, Miss Mallison?” asked Gertrude, with visible constraint.

Anna looked at her then, surprised, and instantly felt the indefinable coldness of her reception of her little story.

“I am on my way to take the ten o’clock train east,” she said simply, her voice faltering slightly. For all her courage and steadiness, her heart was crying out for a little touch of another woman’s gentleness; the way before her was not easy, and there was a sense of loneliness upon her which began to make itself acutely felt.

Gertrude Ingraham rose and said:—

“I am so very sorry for Mr. Burgess. We liked him very much. You must let me go and speak to mamma a moment, for I know she would wish to give you some message. I will not keep you long.” And she hurried from the room.

Anna sat alone and watched the minute-hand of a French clock on the mantel moving slowly along the gilded dial, a heavy oppression on her spirit. She had not consciously expected sympathy, but Gertrude’s aloofness hurt her strangely.

Some one came softly into the room behind her just then, so softly that she turned rather because she felt a presence than because she heard a step. It was Oliver Ingraham.

The peculiar personality of this mysterious man inspired Anna always with an aversion hardly less than terror, and although she had become familiar with his presence in her frequent visits, it had never become less painful to her. Indeed, latterly, a new element of discomfort had been added to her feeling toward him, since he had shown a marked disposition to follow her about, and intrude a manner of unpleasant gallantry upon her.

He greeted her now almost effusively, and, perceiving that she was prepared as if for a journey, asked at once:—

“Not going away? The painful hour of parting is not here yet, surely?”

Anna made a vague and hurried reply.

“Because, you know,” pursued Oliver, lowering his voice to an offensive tone of familiarity, and maliciously mimicking the phraseology of his stepmother’s friends, “we could hardly spare our dear young sister yet; she is becoming really indispensable to us,” and he held out one long hand as if to clasp that of Anna, leering at her repulsively.

Anna rose hurriedly and moved away from him, her heart beating hard with fear and antipathy. To her great relief she heard Gertrude Ingraham’s step in the hall, and Anna, with her face paler than it had been, met her at the door, while Oliver slunk away to a little distance, and appeared to be looking out of a window unconcernedly.

Gertrude Ingraham carried a pocket-book open in her hand, and as she spoke she looked at it, and not at Anna.

“Mamma is so very sorry, and sends her best wishes and hopes for Mr. Burgess’s quick recovery. She hopes you will let her know; and, Miss Mallison,” Gertrude was evidently embarrassed, “mamma says it is such a long and expensive journey, and she wishes you would just take this with you to make everything as comfortable as may be.” And she drew out a crisp twenty-dollar note, which she essayed to put in Anna’s hand.

Anna had not known before that she was proud. She did not know it now, but Gertrude Ingraham did, and was touched with keen compunction. She understood that her mother would have been more successful.

It was only the swift, unconscious protest of Anna’s hand, the pose of her head as she turned to go, and the quiet finality with which she said:—

“Will you thank Mrs. Ingraham for me, and say I did not need it? She is always kind. Good-by.”

A moment later Gertrude watched from the window the slender figure in its faded, scanty black, with the heavy, old-fashioned satchel, passing down the windswept lawn, under the grey and bitter sky.

Within was warmth and luxury and protection, and yet Gertrude’s heart leaped with a strong passion of desire to forego all this and take Anna Mallison’s place, that so she might start on that long journey which should bring her, at its end, to the side of Keith Burgess.

Small, unseen tragedies in women’s lives such as this, never once, perhaps, expressed, and never forgotten, work out the heroic hypocrisies which women learn, since such is their allotted part.

“You might have known better than to offer money to that girl,” Oliver’s high, shrill voice behind Gertrude said. “She’s as confoundedly proud as all the other saints. But she’ll have to come down yet. We shall see some day.”

Thus unpleasantly interrupted in her reverie, Gertrude rose impatiently, and left the room.

It was eight o’clock that evening when Anna reached Boston. Dismayed by the small remainder of money left her after her railway ticket was bought, she had not dared to spend anything for food through all the day, and had tried to think the cold, dry bread, a few slices of which she had put into her satchel, was sufficient for her needs.

In Boston a change of stations made a cab a necessity if she would not lose the Portland train, and this she must not do, since she had telegraphed Keith from Burlington that she would be with him in the morning. Anna alighted at the station of the Maine Railroad and heard the cabman say that his fee was two dollars with a sensation hardly less than terror. She paid him without a word, then entering the station, sat down in the glare of light amid the confusion of the moving crowd, and looked into her poor little purse, a sharp contraction at her throat as she counted, and found less than three dollars left.

The train would leave in fifteen minutes. Anna went with as brave a face as she could manage, to the office, and asked what was the fare to Portland. The curt reply of the agent proved the glaring insufficiency of her small remaining store. Trembling with weakness and dismay, Anna turned back to her place and sat down, closing her eyes while she prayed. She had friends in missionary circles in Boston, who would gladly have lent her money, but time failed to seek them out. She thought, as she prayed, of the money which Gertrude Ingraham had proffered in the morning, and, humbled, asked forgiveness for the ignorance and pride which had led her to reject it. The thought of Keith watching, perhaps in vain, for her coming in his loneliness and great need, perhaps in his extremity, overwhelmed her with pity and penitence. Having prayed for forgiveness and for guidance, and for a way out, and a way to Keith that night, she opened her eyes, astonished for the moment at the harsh light and the motley scene about her, her actual surroundings having been for the time forgotten in the complete abstraction of her mind. She gazed for a few moments languidly before her, her face so colourless and sorrowful that many persons who passed her looked back at her in curiosity and concern. Presently the space before her became clear; there was a pause in the fluctuating course of passers-by, and nothing interposed, for the instant, between her and the window of the ticket office.

An elderly gentleman in a long travelling cloak and silk hat, carrying a snug and shiny travelling bag, came up to the window with the confident and assured bearing of the experienced traveller. Anna heard him ask for a ticket to Portland. She recognized him at once, for it was Dr. Durham, the missionary secretary who had once been her father’s guest.

When he turned from the window, the doctor found the pale, quiet girl in black standing just behind him; she spoke to him with a radiant light in her face, such as he had never met before. To herself, Anna was saying with a sense of exquisite joy in her heart, “God is near,” feeling herself close touched by the Almightiness. To her father’s friend she told her story and her need in few words, without hesitation or doubt, declaring, necessarily, her engagement to Keith Burgess, and the fact that she was hastening to reach him on account of his serious illness.

“Amazing, my dear,” exclaimed Dr. Durham, taking off his hat and wiping the large shining baldness of his head, “amazing indeed! I am myself on my way to Burgess, and we can make the journey together. Poor fellow! It is a sad case. I had a telegram yesterday, but it was impossible to start until to-night. It seems he has had a hemorrhage. But we will talk all this over on the way,” and the good old gentleman made haste to buy Anna’s ticket, which he said it was only the part of the Society to do, and she must never mention it again. This done, they hastened on together to the train.

How true it is that our destinies are decided by nothings, and that a small imprudence helped by some insignificant accident, as an acorn is fertilized by a drop of rain, may raise the tree on which perhaps we and others shall be crucified....

Poor, sorely tried Faith! She has but one way out of the difficulty—the word Mystery. It is in the origins of things that the great secret of destiny lies hidden, although the breathless sequence of after events has often many surprises for us too.—Amiel.

The incredible luxury of her breakfast the next morning in the hotel in Portland made an impression upon Anna which she could never forget, since she was, in fact, very nearly starved. The rich coffee, the delicate and sumptuous food, the noiseless assiduity of the sleek black waiters, the great glittering room, all partook of the marvellous to her exhausted senses.

Then she was conducted through endless passages where her feet trod in baffling silence upon the lanes of thick crimson carpet, for a few moments she was alone in a room to bathe and prepare herself, and then a low-voiced woman, stout and motherly, met her at the door, and she was led to Keith.

He was lying, fully dressed, on a broad velvet sofa, in a richly furnished room, which was full of flowers, and bright with the light of the snowy winter morning and a blazing wood fire. His eyes were luminous, his colour better than she had known it, and he did not look ill. The nurse left them alone, and they met with unfeigned but quiet happiness.

“Was I selfish to ask you to come this long journey, just for me?” Keith asked anxiously, holding her hands. Anna found his hot and tremulous, and soothed them with a slow, strong motion of her own.

“No, not selfish,” she said.

“You see, I am not very ill; in fact, I am sure the worst is over now, and I shall be just as well as ever in a few weeks; but I had a terrible cold and coughing so there was a little hemorrhage,—simply from the throat, we understand it now,—but at the time the doctor himself was alarmed, and so was I. If I had known how slight an affair it really was, I should not have asked so much of you, but I cannot be sorry, Anna. I shall have to stay right here for several weeks, they say, and it will be everything to have you near me, don’t you see?”

“I am most grateful to be with you, Keith.”

“And will you talk to me about India, and about our home there? I have thought of it so continually since I have been sick. It almost seems as if I had seen it, and you in it. I love it already, Anna. Please say that you do too, just a little.”

“Tell me about it. Of course I shall love it.”

“It is all made of bamboo, you know, the house, and perched up in the air, and there are great, wide rooms, with cool shade, and a sound of water flowing; there are broad bamboo lattices at the windows, and it is still and peaceful, and the servants go about softly, and you are there in a white dress, Anna,—oh, how I want to see you in that white dress! It has tiny borders of gilt and coloured embroidery, and it suits you so much better than this hard black gown. Will you have a dress made soon like that?”

Anna smiled and pressed her hand over Keith’s eyes, which were full of childish imploring. She was beginning to see his weakness with a new pain at her heart.

She sat with him an hour, and then, the doctor coming in, she was sent to her room to sleep until noon, while Keith should rest, and have an interview with Dr. Durham, their fatherly friend.

When Anna reached her room, she found on a table a large jar of roses, rich in colour and fragrance, and a basket of hothouse grapes. The day was bitterly cold, and it was snowing hard, the thick snowflakes melting against the broad, thick glass of her window.

The extravagant luxury of such fruit and flowers in this depth of midwinter astonished and disturbed her. There was no one of whom she could ask questions, but how could it be right for Keith to spend so much money? To remain for weeks in such a hotel as this seemed to Anna to involve an impossible expenditure, and she lay down on the great luxurious bed with a bewildering confusion of questions to which no answers were forthcoming. From the pinching cold and hunger of yesterday to the luxurious ease of to-day was like the transformation of a fairy tale; and Keith, with his weak hands, and his bright eyes, and his wistful eagerness was formidable in his appeal to her. She did not know what might be coming, but she felt anew that she had surrendered herself and was pledged now to do another’s will.

At noon Anna had a moment’s conference with Keith’s physician. He assured her that there was a remarkable change for the better in his patient,—in fact, that he looked now for a speedy convalescence, adding that her coming had produced a most favourable effect.

The whole afternoon of that January day, Keith and Anna were left alone together. The nurse, glad of a brief release, took her “afternoon out”; the various doctors of medicine and divinity betook themselves to other places; and word was given the page that Mr. Burgess could not receive visitors, so that flowers and cards accumulated, and interruptions were postponed. There was justice in what Keith said, that they had never yet had a chance to get acquainted, and now the afternoon was turned to good account.

Experience and instinct made Anna a nurse. Keith was sure he had never been so wholly comfortable as she made him, and the effect of her personal presence was like health and healing to him.

“How dear you are, Anna, and how absolutely necessary to me,” he said fondly, as he watched her quiet way of preparing his food and medicine. “I foresee plainly that I can never let you leave me.”

When twilight gathered and the room grew dusky, they had no lights, but sat by the fire, Anna on a low seat beside the sofa, and silence fell. When Keith spoke again, his voice betrayed a rising emotion, and an appeal before which she trembled within herself.

“Anna,” he said, “why should you leave me again? Why need we be separated any more? I need you. I can get strong far faster with you beside me, for you inspire me with a new life. Everything seems sure and strong when you are with me. But I want you wholly mine without fear or favour. Marry me, dear, to-night, to-morrow! What have we to wait for? It is only three months before our marriage was to be, you know.”

Concealing her agitation, and speaking quite steadily and soothingly, Anna answered:—

“But you know, Keith, I must go back in a few weeks, and finish my work in the school and hospital. I have still so much to learn before I can make a really useful missionary, and so little time before May to learn it in. You know I have cut my preparation short a year, now, so that we may go out together. I am sure we ought to wait until May.”

“Oh, Anna!”

The words, so spoken, had all the force of an inarticulate cry from the man’s heart. They told what hours of argument and pleading could not have conveyed,—the yearning need for her presence and her upholding. Anna lifted her eyes to Keith’s, and saw that they were dim with tears. She did not feel them to be unmanly tears, knowing his physical exhaustion, and they moved her profoundly. She rose and walked to the window, looking out into the snowy street. Again that sense that her life was taken out of her own hands came upon her; she felt like those of old who feared as they entered into the cloud. She feared, but, nevertheless, she went back to Keith, and said, very gently, but without hesitation:—

“If we should be married to-morrow night, would that please you, Keith?”

He caught her hand and pressed it to his cheek with pathetic eagerness.

“Oh, my girl, am I wrong to move you to do this for my sake? Forgive me, leave me, if I am leading you faster, farther, than you wish to go.”

“I will not leave you, Keith,” Anna replied, taking her low seat again at his side, “never, any more. It is the will of God.”

The next day Keith was much stronger. He was able to walk about the room, to sit up for an hour at a time, and to talk and plan to his heart’s desire. His spirits were high, and he was full of irrepressible happiness, and yet a wistful, grateful question always rose in his eyes when they rested upon Anna. The marriage was arranged to take place in Keith’s room at six o’clock. Dr. Durham had consented to remain and perform the ceremony, returning to Boston that night. Keith’s physician had interposed no objection to the plan, and even regarded the inevitable excitement as likely to be a benefit rather than an injury to his patient.

“He needs you, Miss Mallison,” he remarked with an emphasis which Anna felt to be peculiarly significant, finding him a man of few words.

It was five o’clock, and Anna had gone to her room to make ready for the ceremony. At Keith’s urgent desire, and by the aid of one of the many efficient friends whom the circumstances of his illness had gathered around him, a white dress had been ordered for her. She found it now, lying in delicate tissue wrappings upon her bed, and beside it a box of orange flowers whose fragrance filled the room.

She was becoming a little inured to luxury; colour, warmth, perfume, delight to sense, seemed here to be the natural order. A vague perplexity lay below it all, but she had ceased now to ask questions.

As she bent to take her wedding-gown from its wrappings, some one knocked at her door. It was Dr. Durham. There was a shade of anxiety upon his kind old face, and he asked her to come with him into an alcove at the end of the hall. With an uneasy stirring at her heart, Anna followed him. Keith’s physician was standing by a table in the alcove, evidently awaiting them.

Anna looked into his face, waiting without speaking for what he might have to say. Surely it was impossible that Keith could be worse; it was not ten minutes since she left him.

“Miss Mallison,” said the doctor, gravely, “I have been having a little conference with your friend, Dr. Durham, and we find that there is a chance that you may be under some misapprehension of the actual conditions under which—under which you are about to take an important step.”

“I did not understand it myself, my dear girl, until within the last hour,” interposed Dr. Durham; “and I really don’t know now what we ought to do. Still, perfect frankness, perfect understanding, you know, may be better for all parties.”

The good old man was visibly oppressed with the burden of the part he had to bear in the interview. Motionless Anna stood, only turning her eyes from one man to the other in troubled wonder.

“The facts are simply these,” the physician took up the word again, “and I am greatly surprised, and I may add greatly pained, that they have not apparently been understood before. Mr. Burgess will recover from this attack, and may have years yet of moderate health, but as for carrying out his purpose to go out as a foreign missionary, it is absolutely impossible. Such a course would simply be suicidal, and must not be considered for a moment.”

“Not now, perhaps,” Anna spoke very low, in a strange, muffled tone; “but it may be—later—?” and she turned her imploring eyes from the face of one man to the other.

“To be perfectly frank, my dear,” said Dr. Durham, pressing his hands nervously together, “after what the doctor has told me of the condition of our dear friend, the organic difficulty, and all that, you see—I fear that I can only, in justice to all concerned, state plainly that our Board would not be justified in sending him. I assure you the blow is a severe one to me in my capacity as secretary; for we regard Keith Burgess as, perhaps, the most promising candidate who has ever come before us. It is a dark Providence, and you will believe me that only a sense of our duty in the matter has led us to put the case so plainly before you.”

Anna did not speak.

“I was not aware, Miss Mallison,” said the physician, “until an hour ago, that you were yourself under appointment as a missionary. When I learned this fact, it seemed to me that you should not enter upon the proposed line of action without knowing clearly that it involves giving up your chosen career,” and with these words the doctor bowed and turned to withdraw.

Anna turned to Dr. Durham.

“Mr. Burgess does not know that he must give up—?” she asked.

“No, oh, no,” was the reply; “the doctor says that he must on no account be allowed to learn it until he is stronger. His heart is so entirely bound up in this noble purpose, that the blow will be a terrible one when it comes.”

“We must wait, Miss Mallison, until he is as far as may be recovered, before we allow him to even suspect the actual state of the case;” the doctor added this, looking at Anna’s face with surprise and concern. “If I can serve you in any way, do not fail to call upon me. For the present I must say good evening,” and he hastened away.

Dr. Durham followed, walking along the hall by his side. The look in Anna’s face awed him. He felt that it was not his right to share in an hour of such conflict as this bade fair to be to her, for he perceived already something of what her missionary vocation meant to her. Anna, however, did not notice that he had gone; the crisis was too great to permit her paying heed to the accidental circumstances around her. A voice in her heart seemed crying with constant iteration, “Father! Father! What does God mean?”

For ten minutes Anna stood alone in the alcove, looking steadily before her, but in her bewildered pain seeing no outward thing, while in the far dim reaches of the hall the good old clergyman paced noiselessly to and fro.

On one side Anna saw her father’s life, with all its deep renunciation, its pure aims, its defeat, and its one final hope of fulfilment in herself; she saw the look in his eyes as he bent above her in the little church that night, when she declared her purpose to become a missionary; she remembered his Nunc Dimittis as he blessed her with dying eyes; she lived again through the solemn hour of dedication, just after her father’s death, when the sense came upon her that she was called of God to carry on what her father began, to be in herself the continuance, and through divine grace the fruition, of his life. Since that hour life had meant only one thing to Anna; no other purpose or desire had ever entered to divide or diminish its control over her: she was set apart to carry the gospel of Christ to the heathen; this one thing only would she do.

This on the one side, strong as life itself, inwoven into the very texture of her soul and her consciousness.

On the other side Keith Burgess, even now scarcely better than a stranger, and yet, by the will of God as she believed, bound to her by sacred and indissoluble vows. To be faithful to those vows, to save him from despair, perhaps from death, she must cut off all her past, must read her life all backward, must annul and declare vain and void the most solemn purposes of her soul.

From his retreat, watching, Dr. Durham at length saw Anna advancing down the hall toward the door of her room. He met her there, a question he did not dare to speak in his tired, kind old eyes. Her face was as the face of one who has even in the moment received a spiritual death-blow.

He held his watch in his hand. Without speaking, Anna motioned to him, and he replied:—

“It is nearly half-past five, my dear.”

“Very well,” she said, her voice dull and toneless; “I will be ready at six o’clock.”

As if in a dream she prepared herself for her marriage. She moved as if in response to another will than her own; her own will seemed to lie dead before her, a visible, tangible thing, done to death by her own hand. The white gown, Keith’s gift, seemed less a wedding-garment than a burial robe, and a strange smile crossed her face when she caught her reflection in the glass, and saw that, save for her eyes, her face was wholly colourless, the pale flowers on her breast hardly paler, hardly colder.

At the clock-striking of the appointed hour, Anna entered the room, and, taking her place beside Keith, whose face was full of tender gladness, she lifted her eyes steadily to the old clergyman’s face, listening as for life and death to his words.

“In sickness and in health, ... for richer for poorer, ... and forsaking all others, keep thee only unto him.” Yes, all others. God only knew the significance of those words, for they seemed to mean God himself just then; but God would pity. He would help. Her response came low but unfaltering, and then, with bowed heads, standing side by side in their youth, their innocence, their patience of hope, they two listened solemnly to the last irrevocable words.

So steadfastly Anna held herself until the end, but hardly had the final word of blessing been pronounced, when, with a low cry for help, she wavered as she stood, and fell fainting.