love. Love was a madness that had never perturbed Isaac Ford. When
he answered the call to go to the heathen with the message of life,
he had had no thought and no desire for marriage. In this they were
alike, his father and he. But the Board of Missions was economical.
With New England thrift it weighed and measured and decided that
married missionaries were less expensive per capita and more
efficacious. So the Board commanded Isaac Ford to marry.
Furthermore, it furnished him with a wife, another zealous soul with
no thought of marriage, intent only on doing the Lord's work among
the heathen. They saw each other for the first time in Boston. The
Board brought them together, arranged everything, and by the end of
the week they were married and started on the long voyage around the
Horn.

Percival Ford was proud that he had come of such a union. He had
been born high, and he thought of himself as a spiritual aristocrat.
And he was proud of his father. It was a passion with him. The
erect, austere figure of Isaac Ford had burned itself upon his
pride. On his desk was a miniature of that soldier of the Lord. In
his bedroom hung the portrait of Isaac Ford, painted at the time
when he had served under the Monarchy as prime minister. Not that
Isaac Ford had coveted place and worldly wealth, but that, as prime
minister, and, later, as banker, he had been of greater service to
the missionary cause. The German crowd, and the English crowd, and
all the rest of the trading crowd, had sneered at Isaac Ford as a
commercial soul-saver; but he, his son, knew different. When the
natives, emerging abruptly from their feudal system, with no
conception of the nature and significance of property in land, were
letting their broad acres slip through their fingers, it was Isaac
Ford who had stepped in between the trading crowd and its prey and