as suffering and beauty and splendor. For him, as for Naomi, the flame of faith engulfed all else, but for him the flame sometimes flickered and came near to going out.
He did not know whether he loved Naomi or not, nor what the emotion of love toward her should be. They were brother and sister in Christ and so bound together in Heavenly love. She was his wife by some divine arrangement which slowly began to be clear to him.
It had happened during those months when Naomi, on leave from her father's post, near Lake Tchad, had come to stay as guest in his mother's house, and in that zealous atmosphere, she had seemed a creature bathed in the rosy glow of Heavenly glamour. In the church and at those tent meetings where she spoke from the same platforms as the great evangelist, Homer. Quackenbrush, people honored her as something akin to a saint. She was a real missionary, only twenty-three, who had been born in a mission and had never known any other life. He had listened while she spoke in her curious, loud flat voice of her experiences in Africa and slowly she had worked a sort of enchantment upon him. He became fascinated, enthralled, filled by a fire to follow her in her work, to seize the torch (as she described it) and carry it on, unconscious all the while that it was not the faith but something of the mystery and romance of Africa that captured him. He had gone home one night after the singing to tell his mother that instead of seeking a church he meant to become a missionary. Together they had knelt and prayed while Emma Downes, with
