Anna’s lifelong love for the will of God was so strong that she could not fail to love it to the end, and the struggle was soon succeeded by complete victory and peace.  Her sister wrote Mrs. Joyce after she had gone:  “She did not know why, when so much had been done for her and she was so willing to do any service unto the Lord, she should not be spared, and given a healthy body for the work that seemed to be so much in need of workers.  But she said she was willing to go if it was the Lord’s will, and she wanted people to know that she loved to obey God mare than she desired her own life....  She said she was perfectly willing to go, only she had wanted to work a little longer.”

Her brief struggle passed, her thought was all for others.  She often spoke of the women for whom she had been working, and begged her sister to look after them and keep them from going back to the old ways; and in delirium she pleaded with one and another of them.  She sent messages of love to those who were not with her, some of them being on the other side of the ocean, and sought to lighten the grief of those around her who so longed to keep her with them.  “Do not grieve for me,” she comforted her sister.  “Think of me as you used to think of me when I was in America, only I shall be in a more beautiful place.”  Three days before her death she gave explicit directions about her funeral, wishing that everything in the Chinese funeral rites which savoured at all of non-Christian religions might be eliminated, that in her death, as in her life, she might witness clearly and unmistakably to her loyalty to Christ.

When the last call finally came, on the sixteenth of March, it found her ready and glad to respond.  She told her sister that she had heard the beautiful music and seen the great light and wanted to go.  “That evening,” reads a letter from one of her co-workers, “we missionaries all gathered in the reception hall of their little house, together with her relatives and more intimate friends.  It was one of the most touching scenes I have ever witnessed, for we were all drawn together by the bond of grief over the loss of one we loved.”

Although, in accordance with Anna’s wishes, her funeral was conducted with the utmost simplicity, the funeral procession caused universal comment.  One of the missionaries describes the scene:  “As the procession of almost forty chairs passed down the street all stopped to watch it pass, and despite the unrest due to the recent riots at Nanchang, we heard nothing but kindly remarks.  The fact that foreigners were following one of their own people to the grave, paying the Chinese girl the honour they would have shown to a great man among themselves, seemed to impress the Chinese in a peculiar way.”