She talked of Christ so freely and of her own religious beliefs so naturally that he felt that her speech grew out of her life and he did not resent the personal religious element in her conversation which he had always avoided and resented in others.
But while she was talking in low tones or listening to him as he, in turn, told of his home in England, she kept a keen eye on her patient. About eight o'clock at night a change came. The moaning stopped; the restless brown hands grew still; the breath came regularly; and Nona slept a quiet, restful sleep. The memsahib, on her knees beside the bed, looked up at the big, burly, white man standing on the other side of the narrow couch. "She will get well," she said simply. "And now—now"—she stammered with difficulty, "you will marry her, won't you?"
As the astonished man gazed into her wistful, earnest face a slow resolve grew in his own. The coming of this strong, wholesome woman into his life, the revival of the memories of his boyhood, the face of his mother, never entirely forgotten, and now clear and vivid before his very eyes, and, more even than all these, the dawning consciousness of the Presence in which his life had been lived and was now being judged cleared away all his ethical confusion, revealed to him the evil of his past life and begat in him a great desire for cleansing and a high purpose to make amends for the past.
And so when the missionary memsahib said to him, "You will marry her, won't you?" his astonishment slowly gave way to a sense of high moral purpose. After a silence which revealed the struggle within, he replied in a firm voice, "I will! and may God bless you."
With these words the man dropped upon his knees on the other side of the bed and his head rested for a moment on the pillow very close to the beautiful brown face there. Then, without asking permission, the missionary prayed a simple prayer of thanksgiving for the life of the woman and a request for a blessing upon her English brother and herself that they might shape their lives after the character of Christ and live according to Christian laws.
Then the missionary slipped quietly out of the room, for the danger was over and the servants could take as good care of their mistress as could she. But she promised the anxious ayah as she went away that she would come in from time to time for a few days to see that all went well.
Two weeks from that day an Englishman stood with a Hindu woman by his side in a missionary's parlour and there a quiet wedding ceremony was performed. To the bride it meant nothing, but to the bridegroom it meant an entire change in his life and heart.
Several years later an English gentleman bore unflinchingly the embarrassment—and worse—of introducing an Indian wife to his English family at home. Tenderly he sheltered her from all annoyances and apparently with pride he took her from place to place in the homeland. Only one person, a missionary from India, home on a long-delayed furlough, guessed that the journey was one prolonged torture to the man who, from a high sense of duty to a woman who could not even comprehend it, was making her all amends in his power for a wrong which, also, she did not comprehend.