It was the lot of Mrs. House to do little more than to inaugurate
the new school, for her health rendered a long period of service
impossible. But in even initiating the movement she did far more
than she realised at the time, for she was investing in the
enterprise an accumulation of experience and a wealth of influence
among the women of Bangkok such as no one else possessed, and
which gave the institution a capital from which it began to draw
immediate returns. Such a school could not have been organised by
a new leader, however skilled in educational matters, without long
years of cultivation of personal relations with the mothers and
girls. One can see now that Mrs. House’s return to Siam for another
trial of health had a higher wisdom than even she could perceive;
for while it seemed a daring of Providence, it was in fact the
wisdom of the great Teacher for her to expend the final momentum
of her personal prestige and thereby buy up a decade of time or
more at the expenditure of her last four years of effort.
The return to Siam in 1872 found the climate less kindly to her.
Then came a new development, an attack of asthma which lasted for
nearly eight months, so debilitating her as to render it necessary
for her to relinquish the cherished work into other hands. In
March, 1876, after twenty years of faithful, zealous and labourious
work for the Kingdom of God among the women of Siam, she bade
farewell to her friends there and returned to America with her
husband.
“Need I tell you that I left Siam with a sad, sad heart?
At the monthly concert this month my feelings overcame me
so that I felt as if I could not attend another till I
became more reconciled to the thought that I can never again
labour among the heathen. I think many of the Siamese truly
regretted our leaving. The dear school girls followed us
weeping to the landing, and we could hear their sobs as long
as we could see them waving goodbye.
“Had I not felt it a case of life and death, I could not
have torn myself away. It was plain duty but it seemed to me
a dark providence that I should so soon be obliged to leave
this dear school, the result of so much labour and prayer and
of so many trials.”