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,
I am yours very truly,
Sarah Keith Burgess.
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:—
Anna Mallison,
From her sincere friend and well-wisher,
Keith Burgess.