So far Jean Arnot had been only interested and amused. But the sound of his voice, clear and round and full as an organ tone, made her jump with surprise. He had spoken quite naturally, but there was a ring in it that told of immense possibilities behind, and there was something in it that plucked at some hidden chord of Jean's memory and set it humming as a harp-string responds to a bugle note.
She stared at him eagerly. Had she ever by any possibility met him before? She could hardly have forgotten it if she had, she thought. For he was a young man of most striking appearance. Tall, square-shouldered and broad-chested—a commanding figure in truth. It occurred to others besides Jean that if the natives needed more forcible arguments than words for their conversion, here was a likely man for the work. Light-haired and clean-shaven, his face seemed to glow with an inner radiance—a masterful face, and grave. His eyes were wonderfully magnetic; fearless and steadfast, they made you jump as their glance crossed your own. Jean had just jumped, so she knew.
Now who was this? Surely she had met him before somewhere.
Remember it was ten years since she had seen him, and then only for half an hour, and under very different conditions, and she had never heard his name since.
She ordered her brain, or her heart, or whichever of her inner servants it was that held the key, to go find it, and sat gazing at him to give them such light as that might afford. But the clue evaded her till he was near the end of his quiet, forceful talk.
He had told them of his hopes, and the plans he and Gerson hoped to carry out—"The grandest man I have ever met, a most noble Christian gentleman," he said, in a burst of enthusiasm. He asked them for their help, their prayers, their sympathetic remembrance, their money—since the work had to be maintained from the outside, and even missionaries must live.
He spoke very simply, with no ornate periods or calculated sentences; but his voice was like a trumpet, and his eyes were like stars, and his words were illuminating and full of power, and now and again were flung out white hot from the glowing heart within. Though he spoke for the most part so restrainedly, now and again the brake would slip, and the sweet, white fire of a great, enthusiastic soul would flame through.
Perhaps he was a trifle over-confident of success—that is one of youth's glories and pitfalls; but there was no doubt that his whole heart was in his work—that here, for once at all events, a square man had found his own square hole.
"It was always the great hope and desire of my boyhood to go out into these unknown lands," he was saying. "Though perhaps at that time the inducement was chiefly the unknown, and the inhabitants, I fear, appealed to me more as possible hindrances than inducements. When I tended my uncle's cattle on the hillsides of the Cut——"
And then she knew him, and she sat up with a jerk, and stared at him as though she had only that moment awakened to the fact that he was speaking.