“Why do you say that?” he asked.

“Oh, well,” she said—­and left the sentence unfinished, save by an outward motion of her hands that might have meant anything.  But she smiled, and Mr. Thompson observed that she had fine, white, even teeth.  Each time he saw her some salient personal feature seemed to claim his attention.  To be sure he had seen other girls with good teeth and red lips and other physical charms perhaps as great as Sophie Carr’s.  But these things had never riveted his attention.  There was something about this girl that quickened every fiber of his being.  And even while she made him always acutely conscious of her bodily presence, he was a little bit afraid of her.  He had swift, discomforting visions of her standing afar beckoning to him, and of himself unable to resist, no matter what the penalty.  She stirred up things in his mind that made him blush.  He was conscious of a desire to touch her hand, to kiss her.  He found himself totally unable to close the gates of his mind against such thoughts when she was near him.  And it was self-generated within him.  Sophie Carr was never more than impersonally pleasant to him.  Sometimes she was utterly indifferent.  Often she said things about his calling that made him wince.

“Tell me,” Thompson said abruptly, after a momentary silence, “how it happens that the men who have been here before me left no trace of any—­any—­well, anything?  There have been other missionaries.  They had funds.  They were stationed here.  What did they do?  I have been going to ask your father.  I daresay you can tell me yourself.”

The girl laughed, whether at the question or at his earnestness he could not say.

“They did nothing,” she answered in an amused tone.  “What could they do?  You haven’t begun to realize yet what a difficult job you’ve tackled.  The others came here, stayed awhile, threw up their hands and went away.  Their idea of doing good seemed to consist of having a ready-made church and a ready-made congregation, and to preach nice little, ready-made religiosities on a Sunday.  You can’t preach anything to a people who don’t understand a word you say, and who are mostly too busy with more pressing affairs to listen if they did understand.  And you see for yourself there’s no church.”

“But what did these fellows do?” he persisted.  That had been puzzling him.

“Nothing,” she said scornfully “nothing but sit around and complain about the loneliness and the coarse food and the discouraging outlook.  Then they’d finally go away—­go back to where they came from, I suppose.”

“The last man,” Thompson ventured doubtfully.  “The factor at Pachugan told me Mr. Carr assaulted him.  That seems rather odd to me, after what I’ve seen of your father.  Was it so?”

“The last missionary wasn’t what you’d call a good man, in any sense,” Sophie answered frankly.  “He was here most of one summer, and toward the last he showed himself up pretty badly.  He developed a nasty trick of annoying little native girls.  Dad thrashed him properly.  Dad took it as a sort of reflection on us.  Even the Indians don’t approve of that sort of thing.  He left in a hurry, after that.”