s before me of three warm-hearted maidens who a few years
ago belonged to our girls' class: the eldest came but seldom, for she
was toiling over shirtmaking for the support of her mother and sister.
This sister and a friend made up the trio.

Their mothers were "adherents"--we had hoped at one time MORE than
adherents, but compromise was already winning the day: the daughters had
open hearts towards the Lord, all of them in a child-like way.

Where are they now?

They came to marriageable age, and Moslem etiquette required that they
should marry. We begged the mothers to wait a while and see if some
Christian lads were not forthcoming: but no, fashion binds as much in a
Moslem town as in the West End of London.

The eldest girl was carried out fainting from her home to be the wife of
a countryman. He was good to her: his mother became madly jealous.
Within two years the bride fell into a strange kind of decline; when
death came there were symptoms showing that it was from slow poison.

The second to marry was the little friend. At her wedding feast those
who had forced the marriage on, drugged her with one of their terrible
brain-poisons. The spell worked till she could not bear the sight of us,
and hated and denounced Christ.

It wore itself out after a few months and light and love crept back. We
went away for the summer. Before we returned she had been put to death
by her husband. Through the delirium of the last day and night her one
intelligible cry was "Jesus"; so the broken-hearted mother told us. She
was an only child.

The third is still alive, a mere girl. She has been divorced twice
already from drunken, dissolute husbands. Long intervals of silent
melancholy come upon her, intense and dumb, like threatening
brain-trouble. She was playful as a kitten five years ago.

Poor little souls--crushed every one of them at sixteen or seventeen
under the heel of Islam. Do you wonder that we do not consider it an
elevating creed?

And yet they have gone under without tasting the bitterest dregs of a
native woman's cup; for (save a baby of the eldest girl's who lived only
a few weeks) there were no children in the question. And the woman's
deepest anguish begins where they are concerned. For divorce is always
hanging over her head. The birth of a daughter when a son had been hoped
for, an illness that has become a bit tedious, a bit of caprice or
counter-attraction on the husband's part--any of these things may