Mrs. Oakley pondered the question. "I reckon like most other people I was afraid of the word happiness," she replied. "But when I was just a girl, not more than sixteen or seventeen, I felt the call to be a missionary, and I wanted it, I s'pose, more than I've ever wanted anything in my life. I reckon it started with my favourite hymn, the missionary one. Even as a little child I used to think and dream about India's coral strand and Afric's sunny fountains. That was why I got engaged to Gordon Kane. I wasn't what you'd call in love with him; but I believed the Lord had intended me for work in foreign fields, and it seemed, when Gordon asked me to marry him, that an opportunity had been put in my way. I had my trunk all packed to go to the Congo to join him. I was just folding up my wedding-dress of white organdie when they broke the news to me of his death." She gasped and choked for a moment. "After that I put the thought of the heathen out of my mind," she continued when she had recovered her breath. "Your great-grandfather said I was too young to decide whether I had a special vocation or not, and then before I came out of mourning, I met your father, and we were married. For a while I seemed to forget all about the missionary call; but it came back just before Josiah was born, and I've had it ever since whenever I'm worried and feel that I'll have to get away from things, or go clean out of my mind. Then I begin to have that dream about coral strands and palm trees and ancient rivers and naked black babies thrown to crocodiles. When it first came I tried to drive it away by hard work, and that was the way I got in the habit of working to rest my mind. I was so afraid folks would begin to say I was unhinged." "Does it still come back?" asked the girl. "Sometimes in my sleep. When I'm awake I never think of it now, except on missionary Sunday when we sing that hymn." "That's why you enjoy sermons about the Holy Land and far-off places." "I used to know all those pictures by heart in your great-grandfather's books about Asia and Africa. It was a wild streak in me, I reckon," she conceded humbly, "but with the Lord's help, I've managed to stamp it out." A missionary, her mother! For more than forty years this dark and secret river of her dream had flowed silently beneath the commonplace crust of experience. "I wonder if there is any of that wildness in me?" thought the girl, with a sensation of fear, as if the invisible flood were rushing over her. "Did you ever tell Pa?" she asked. Mrs. Oakley shook her head. "I never told anybody when I was in my right mind. I don't believe in telling men more than you're obliged to. After all, it was nobody's fault the way things turned out," she added, with scrupulous justice. "I'm going in now to get that mosquito netting. There's your father coming. I reckon he'd like a drink of fresh water from the well."