moment.

"If I'm to be forbidden to draw pictures," repeated the girl, "I don't
know what will become of me. Because I really live there--in the
pictures I make."

"We'll talk it over this evening, darling. Don't draw in study hour
any more, will you?"

"I'll try to remember, mother."

* * * * *

When the spindle-limbed, boyish figure had sped away beyond sight,
Mrs. Carew shut the door, drew her wool shawl closer, and returned
slowly to the sitting-room. Her husband, deep in a padded
rocking-chair by the window, was already absorbed in the volume which
lay open on his knees--the life of the Reverend Adoniram Judson--one
of the world's good men. Ruhannah had named her cat after him.

His wife seated herself. She had dishes to do, two bedrooms,
preparations for noonday dinner--the usual and unchangeable routine.
She turned and looked out of the window across brown fields thinly
powdered with snow. Along a brawling, wintry-dark stream, fringed with
grey alders, ran the Brookhollow road. Clumps of pines and elms
bordered it. There was nothing else to see except a distant crow in a
ten-acre lot, walking solemnly about all by himself.

... Like the vultures that wandered through the compound that dreadful
day in May ... she thought involuntarily.

But it was a far cry from Trebizond to Brookhollow. And her husband
had been obliged to give up after the last massacre, when every
convert had been dragged out and killed in the floating shadow of the
Stars and Stripes, languidly brilliant overhead.

For the Sublime Porte and the Kurds had had their usual way at last;
there was nothing left of the Mission; school and converts were gone;
her wounded husband, her baby, and herself refugees in a foreign
consulate; and the Turkish Government making apologies with its fat
tongue in its greasy cheek.

The Koran says: "Woe to those who pray, and in their prayers are
careless."

The Koran also says: "In the name of God the Compassionate, the
Merciful: What thinkest thou of him who treateth our religion as a
lie?"

Mrs. Carew and her crippled husband knew, now, what the Sublime Porte
thought about it, and what was the opinion of the Kurdish cavalry
concerning missionaries and converts who treated the Moslem religion
as a lie.

She looked at her pallid and crippled husband; he was still reading;
his crutches lay beside him on the floor. She turned her eyes to the
window. Out there