“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?”