'I am very much encouraged and thankful about the little Church. I can honestly say that I have tried to do my best for it during your absence, and God has encouraged me a good deal in it. I have reaped some that you have sown, and have endeavoured to sow something for you to reap when you return. 'I sometimes have deep fits of the blues when I think of the children, but their mother was able to trust Jesus with them, and why should not I? 'The Mongol work, too, has entered on a new phase, and that opens up a new future for me. It is a formidable affair. I don't think I'll go to Kalgan or that region. I fear no doctor would stay with me there. I may go away North-east. I can hardly tell yet. Meantime, with God's help, I hope to do another month's work in Peking, and then hand the thing over to Rees once for all. Most of my books I'll sell. What use are they to me? I never have time to read them, and am not likely ever to have.' The letter just quoted was written after the sad event to which we must now refer. Towards the close of the summer of 1885 Mr. Gilmour awoke to the fact that one of the heaviest sorrows of his life was coming upon him. For some years past Mrs. Gilmour had been subject to severe attacks of pain. The visit to England and the rest and change of the old home life had in a measure restored her. But hardly were they comfortably established in their old Peking quarters ere some of her most trying symptoms reappeared. With that brave heart and resolute spirit characteristic of her whole missionary career, for a time she gave herself to the duties of the mission and bore her full share of its anxieties and toils. But gradually she was constrained to recognise that her active work was over. From the first she had thrown herself whole-heartedly into missionary Service. She could converse fluently with the Mongols, having acquired their language in the same way as her husband, by enduring repeatedly all the privations of life in a Mongol tent. She had impressed them by her fondness for animals, by her gentleness of spirit, and by her evident interest in all that bore upon their own welfare. In Peking she had laboured hard among the women and girls, both in the matter of education and also of direct religious instruction. A very bitter element in her cup of sorrow was the conviction gradually forced upon her that her power to do this work was fast slipping away. In a letter to her sister, Mrs. Meech, then in England, dated May 2, 1885, she gives the first clear expression to this feeling: 'I would have written before, but I have been ill for about six weeks; not actually ill, except one week, but not able to do anything except the children's lessons and the harmonium on Sundays sometimes. All the rest has had to go. I am sorry, but it can't be helped. How long it will last I don't know. I can't get stronger, so I must be content to be tired.