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:—