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.”