It was the lot of Mrs. House to do little more than to inaugurate the new school, for her health rendered a long period of service impossible. But in even initiating the movement she did far more than she realised at the time, for she was investing in the enterprise an accumulation of experience and a wealth of influence among the women of Bangkok such as no one else possessed, and which gave the institution a capital from which it began to draw immediate returns. Such a school could not have been organised by a new leader, however skilled in educational matters, without long years of cultivation of personal relations with the mothers and girls. One can see now that Mrs. House’s return to Siam for another trial of health had a higher wisdom than even she could perceive; for while it seemed a daring of Providence, it was in fact the wisdom of the great Teacher for her to expend the final momentum of her personal prestige and thereby buy up a decade of time or more at the expenditure of her last four years of effort. The return to Siam in 1872 found the climate less kindly to her. Then came a new development, an attack of asthma which lasted for nearly eight months, so debilitating her as to render it necessary for her to relinquish the cherished work into other hands. In March, 1876, after twenty years of faithful, zealous and labourious work for the Kingdom of God among the women of Siam, she bade farewell to her friends there and returned to America with her husband. “Need I tell you that I left Siam with a sad, sad heart? At the monthly concert this month my feelings overcame me so that I felt as if I could not attend another till I became more reconciled to the thought that I can never again labour among the heathen. I think many of the Siamese truly regretted our leaving. The dear school girls followed us weeping to the landing, and we could hear their sobs as long as we could see them waving goodbye. “Had I not felt it a case of life and death, I could not have torn myself away. It was plain duty but it seemed to me a dark providence that I should so soon be obliged to leave this dear school, the result of so much labour and prayer and of so many trials.” AN ESTIMATE OF HER WORK