She had been (as Spink would have put it) “the whole show”; had led, inspired, organized her husband’s work, held it together, and given it the brave front it presented to the unheeding heathen. Now the heathen had almost entirely fallen away, and the too evident inference was that they had come rather for Mrs. Blandhorn’s pills than for her husband’s preaching. Neither of the missionaries had avowed this discovery to the other, but to Willard at least it was implied in all the circumlocutions and evasions of their endless talks. The young man’s situation had been greatly changed by Mrs. Blandhorn’s death. His superior had grown touchingly dependent on him. Their conversation, formerly confined to parochial matters, now ranged from abstruse doctrinal problems to the question of how to induce Myriem, who had deplorably “relapsed,” to keep the kitchen cleaner and spend less time on the roofs. Bent felt that Mr. Blandhorn needed him at every moment, and that, during any prolonged absence, something vaguely “unfortunate” might happen at the Mission. “I’m glad Spink has come; it will do him good to see somebody from outside,” Willard thought, nervously hoping that Spink (a good fellow at bottom) would not trouble Mr. Blandhorn by any of his “unsettling” questions. At the end of a labyrinth of lanes, on the farther side of the Jewish quarter, a wall of heat-cracked clay bore the inscription: “American Evangelical Mission.” Underneath it a door opened into a court where an old woman in a bright head-dress sat under a fig-tree pounding something in a mortar. She looked up, and, rising, touched Bent’s draperies with her lips. Her small face, withered as a dry medlar, was full of an ancient wisdom: Mrs. Blandhorn had certainly been right in trusting Myriem. A narrow house-front looked upon the court. Bent climbed the stairs to Mr. Blandhorn’s study. It was a small room with a few dog-eared books on a set of rough shelves, the table at which Mr. Blandhorn wrote his reports for the Society, and a mattress covered with a bit of faded carpet, on which he slept. Near the window stood Mrs. Blandhorn’s sewing-machine; it had never been moved since her death.