when we
awoke next morning. And as a dream so the parents passed out of sight,
for they left before the dawn. But weeks afterwards we heard what had
happened that night. They had lodged in the Hindu village outside our
gate. There has never been a Christian there, and the people have never
responded in any way. It is a little shut-in place of darkness on the
borders of the light. But when the parents proposed a raid upon the
bungalow that night they would not rise to it. "No, we have no feud with
the bungalow. We will not do it." The nearest white face was a day's
journey distant, and a woman alone, white or brown, does not count for
much in Hindu eyes. But the Wall of Fire was around us, and so we were
safe.

If the story could stop here, how easy life would be! One fight, one
fling to the lions, and then the palm and crown. But it is not so. The
perils of reaction are greater for the convert than the first great
strain of facing the alternative, "Diana or Christ." Home-sickness
comes, wave upon wave, and all but sweeps the soul away; feelings and
longings asleep in the child awake in the girl, and draw her and woo
her, and blind her too often to all that yielding means. She forgets the
under-side of the life she has forsaken; she remembers only the
alluring; and all that is natural pleads within her, and will not let
her rest. "Across the will of Nature leads on the path of God," is
sternly true for the convert in a Hindu or Moslem land.

And so we write this unfinished story in faith that some one reading it
will remember the young girl-converts as well as the little children.
Fawn has been kept steadfast, but she still needs prayer. These last
five years have held anxious hours for those who love her, and to us, as
to all who have to do with converts. "Perpetual knockings at Thy door,
tears sullying Thy transparent rooms," are words that go deep and touch
the heart of things.

CHAPTER XXVI

The Glory of the Usual

[Illustration: AFTER HER BOTTLE.]

"AND all things were done in such excellent methods, and I cannot tell
how, but things in the doing of them seemed to cast a smile"--is a
beautiful sentence from Bunyan's _Holy War_, which has been with us ever
since we began the Nursery work. Lately we found its complement in a
modern book of sermons, _The Unlighted Lustre_, by G. H. Morrison. "No
matter how stirring your life be, it will be a failure if you have never
been wakened to the glory of the usu