Grace could not help remembering what a thin reed of a fellow he had been when she had first met him. He could barely raise his voice then to reach the back of the crowd where she and her girlfriends were hanging about. It was in 1903 on the Oberlin College campus in Ohio at a ceremony celebrating the erection of a memorial arch to the recent martyred missionaries of Shansi. As the band played a rousing march and the dedication gained momentum, with speaker after speaker extolling the bravery of the missionaries who had lost their lives in the battle against ignorance and fear in a distant province of a distant land, Grace had left her friends under the trees and drifted toward the front of the crowd. Once there, she had noticed the young Reverend who glanced repeatedly at the papers in his hand as he prepared to take the stage.
When he stepped forward, the young man towered over the dais, inspiring hope in the crowd that this chap would carry them away with his words. But, instead, his voice had faltered, and Grace could plainly hear that he had the uncertain rasp of a humble servant of God with a head cold. His eyes did not blaze yet with purpose, although he vowed to move to China that very year, but instead blinked under eyebrows that twitched unpredictably. Young Grace felt a surprising tenderness toward this man who bowed awkwardly when he finished speaking. Later she would wonder how she could possibly have sensed his power and potential based on that uninspired performance.
As she looked around now at the crowded chapel and her husband's flushed face and heroic stance there above them all, she allowed herself to consider that her direction had changed forever, not only because of the message of sacrifice and endurance that the young Reverend had conveyed on the first day she had met him but because the sun had glinted off his fine spectacles and the hand that held his remarks had trembled most sincerely. There was no doubt in her mind that she had chosen her path well, especially because he had become enamored of her, too, not long after her arrival in Fenchow-fu, and their destiny together had been sealed.
In a surprising magazine that had fallen into her hands during her brief stay in New York prior to her departure for Cathay, Grace had read the rather forward advice that a modern woman must take the reins in matters of the heart. The Lady's Realm printed articles not only about how women now had the right to vote in four Western states, whereas it was unheard-of in the rest of the country, but also on how a lady could manage her own honeymoon. The modern woman understood that when she married a gentleman greatly distracted by ambition, she must nonetheless persevere with her own hopes and dreams. Grace was not sure what her own hopes and dreams might be, but she recognized that the Reverend was a man much distracted by ambition.
Indeed, the man before her today bore none of the human frailty and lack of surety of the young man she had first met but instead, was a substantial figure who had achieved a great deal. She rather liked that he appeared now as the Chinese had come to see him— as a bear, a giant, an oversized miracle of a man. Ghost Man, they called him, and she could see why.
Grace reminded herself that as a girl of twenty, she could instead have become a schoolteacher in a one-room schoolhouse on the Midwestern plains, a librarian in the college town, or most certainly a secretary to one of her father's fellow academics on campus. Instead, four years before, she had followed a man in whom she sensed greatness into the desert halfway around the world, and it was here that she now watched him spin his words into blazing gold.
"I, too, am a sinner," the Reverend called out in a fiery voice. "I am one of the fallen."
Grace glanced about and saw that the Chinese sat on the edges of the pews, their whole bodies tilting toward him, their hands clasped and their eyes rapt in attention. The other ministers and their wives shifted uneasily in their seats. The Reverend's sudden urge for selfrevelation was not at all the usual approach to their mission. Grace dared to look again at Mildred