The sickness dragged on for three years, swallowing up her young life. The only people she saw were Alice Lamb and her family. She had not the strength even to attend church and began to be nervous of going out.

Despite her father’s remonstrations and the baffled attempts of the village doctor who suggested tonics, she just could not seem to get moving. Unlike Annie who was almost always full of an electric energy.

In gentler moods, her father would sit and read to her. They were sweet times. He would fold himself into the little wicker chair beside her bed, one long leg crossed over the other. She could feel his worry and care. They would say a prayer, he might read to her from scripture or some other improving book. (Annie read to her from different, more exciting books.) And sometimes she could not help weeping in despair.

After she had been ill for two years, Annie, ever sharp, said one day, ‘I think it’s that you’re sheltering from the world.’ It was not said in accusation. Annie was fifteen by then. The two of them spent a lot of time in each other’s company, were each other’s mother as well as sister. ‘One day, you’ll just emerge – like Lazarus.’

‘I’m not dead,’ Margaret whispered.

‘That’s not what I meant,’ Annie said, sitting on the edge of her bed. ‘I just mean, you’ll get better. As if you’re in a box and you have to find where the handle is to get out.’

Annie’s energy and force of belief could make her believe it too and Margaret tried to cling to that. Some days though, it felt as if that time would never come. Her sentence of illness entered its third year. She was a young woman, soon to be eighteen, and still confined to her childhood bed.

‘Father,’ she sobbed to him one afternoon. ‘I long so much to do the Lord’s work, like you. But how can I know what He wants when I am like this?’

Her father was silent for a moment. His leg moved gently, rhythmically, as if he was trying to think what to say.

‘The Lord works in mysterious ways, Margaret,’ he began wearily.

But all the frustration and disappointment which she usually tried to accept or hide came pouring out to her father, whom she had seen as her pattern, her friend. She railed against this narrow, invalid life to which she had been reduced when she felt she surely must be called to much more. All her life she had been told that there would be a calling!

‘I thought I was to be a missionary,’ she wept. ‘I want to be like you, Father. I am ready – my mind and my heart. But my body fails me all the time. And I’m so tired of it.’