f.

CHAPTER XXXV

What if she misses her Chance?

"Who would be planted chooseth not the soil
Or here or there, . . .
Lord even so
I ask one prayer,
The which if it be granted
It skills not where
Thou plantest me, only I would be planted."

T. E. BROWN.

TWO pictures of two evenings rise as I write. One is of an English
fireside in a country house. The lamps have been lighted, and the
curtains drawn. The air is full of the undefined scent of
chrysanthemums, and the stronger sweetness of hyacinths comes from a
stand in the window. Curled up in a roomy arm-chair by the fire sits a
girl with a kitten asleep on her lap. She is reading a missionary book.

The other this: a white carved cupola in the centre of a piece of water
enclosed by white walls. People are sitting on the walls and pressing
close about them in their thousands. A gorgeous barge is floating slowly
round the shrine. There is very little moon, but the whole place is
alight; sometimes the water is ablaze with ruby and amber; this fades,
and a weird blue-green shimmers across the barge, and electric lamps at
the corners of the square lend brilliancy to the scene. The barge is
covered with crimson trappings, and hundreds of wreaths of white
oleander hang curtain-wise round what is within--the god and goddess
decked with jewels and smothered in flowers. Round and round the barge
is poled, and in the coloured light all that is gaudy and tawdry is
toned, and becomes only oriental and impressive; and the white shrine in
the centre reflected in the calm coloured water appears in its
alternating dimness, and shining more like a fairy creation than common
handiwork.

We who were at the festival, three of us laden with packets of marked
Gospels, met sometimes as we wandered about unobserved, losing ourselves
in the crowd, that we might the more quietly continue that for which we
were there; and in one such chance meeting we spoke of the English girl
by the fireside, and longed to show her what we saw; and to show it with
such earnestness that she would be drawn to inquire where her Master had
most need of her. But no earnestness of writing can do much after all.
It is true the eye affects the heart, and we would show what we have
seen in the hope that even the second-hand sight might do something; but
words are clumsy, and cannot disc