Twenty years before, on a dark winter night, the Maréchale was passing along the Seine embankment on the way to her place of meeting on the Quai de Valmy. She noticed a girl gazing at the dark, cold waters, and a voice told her that she was meditating suicide. Touching her arm she said--
"Don't look at those black, cruel waters. Come with me and have a nice cup of coffee. You seem to be in trouble."
The girl, whose face was dark and sullen, looked at her suspiciously, and did not speak. The Maréchale gently pleaded with her to come and hear a lady sing.
"She sings beautifully, and you will find light and warmth and comfort, and you will have a good cup of coffee. Do come with me."
The girl at length consented and came. She heard the Maréchale herself sing. She sat right through the service without opening her lips and with a hard look on her face. At the end the Maréchale went down beside her, asked if she had enjoyed the meeting, and said a word to her about the goodness of God. At the mention of the name of God, the girl burst into passionate speech.
"God! Don't talk to me of God! I hate Him. What has He done for me? Why did He take my mother? He doesn't care for me. If He did He would not have let me be born in prison. What have I done to deserve such a life as this? It isn't my fault."
But, while the Maréchale talked with her and prayed with her, the girl's heart was softened. She began to attend the meetings, and soon gave her heart to the Lord Jesus. Born in a prison, and saved from suicide in the Seine, she became in turn her rescuer's best comforter in an hour of supreme sorrow.
When the Maréchale at length plucked up heart to revisit England, after a long absence and silence, her steps were directed to the home of a dear friend and kindred spirit in South London. It was in early girlhood that Mrs. Holman of Jerviston was first attracted to the Maréchale. Her mother had, as Lady Mayoress, invited Miss Booth, before the work began in France, to address a drawing-room meeting in her house, and the indelible impressions made on a receptive mind on that day proved an inspiration to a lifetime of quiet and devoted service of Christ. But so timid and dejected had the Maréchale become that she dreaded the reception that might await her even in the home of a lifelong friend! She trembled as she dragged herself across Streatham Common. She sat down on a seat and--her ruling passion strong as ever--spoke to a beggar about his soul, feeling a certain new kinship with all outcasts and pariahs. When she stood before her friend's door she scarcely had courage to ring the bell, and if she had been told to go to the kitchen and have a cup of tea with the servants, she would have answered quite simply, "Yes, I will go." But Mr. Holman himself opened the door, and his hearty welcome and the outflow of a perfect sympathy at once cast all her fears to the winds. Her friends were ministering angels to her. They nursed her back to health, dried her tears, and made her smile. Their little daughter--now one of the sweetest singers in London--carolled to her every morning and awoke "the hallelujah bird" again in her own breast. And God Himself was meanwhile doing for her what even the best of friends could not do--giving her the Resurrection Life, re-animating her hope, baptising her afresh with the Spirit, not of fear, but of power and of love, breaking all shackles and making her free--free from the ensnaring fear of man, free to obey the Divine call she had received even as a child--woman's Pentecostal call to prophesy for Christ, her one and only Master.