Evie Brand burst into tears. She pleaded with the mission board, but its leaders would not yield. Rules were rules, they said. She was too old to go back to India. She must retire.

The decision was hard for the board. Evie had long sacrificed comforts and family to the mission. Year after year, she had lived entirely on a small inheritance and set aside her official salary to buy land for the mission. But ever since her husband Jesse died of fever, pioneering with her in the Mountains of Death, the mission had not been sure what to do with her. The one task she wanted--to open new work in the mountains--was denied her because she was elderly, single...and opinionated.

From the board's point of view it was senseless to appoint a 68-year-old woman to another five-year term. But years before, Jesse and Evie had vowed to reach five mountain ranges with the Gospel. Four still had to be reached. Evie felt God was calling her to fulfill that vow.

Evie grasped at one last straw. "Please just send me back for one year," she pleaded. "I promise not to make any more trouble. At the end of one year I will retire." Reluctantly, the board agreed. Had they known the secret plan that Evie had confided to her daughter, they surely would have refused permission.

Then Came the Shocker
Evie said good-bye to friends and relatives in England and was back in India by January 1947. The mission appointed her to the plains. Evie did not mind much. It was only for a year!

Camping in the Kalrayan range on every holiday, she plotted her next move. Her son designed a little house for her, and she scrounged building materials and organized it into loads light enough for helpers to tote uphill.

Her year with the mission ended. Fellow missionaries gathered to wish her a tearful good-bye and presented her with a parting present: a lovely lamp.

Evie informed them gleefully that she was retiring from the mission--retiring to take up an independent work in the mountains, to fulfill the commission that she and Jesse had undertaken years before. Her colleagues' protests and warnings fell on deaf ears. As far as Evie was concerned, life begins at 70.

Frilly Dresses
Strictly speaking, life begins a little sooner. Evelyn was born in England in 1879. Her father was a well-to-do merchant; as a young woman Evie cut a fine figure in plumed hats and frilly dresses. Her family was involved in missions, street work, and charities. Her father protected his daughters, even trying to dissuade them from marriages that would take them away from him, but one by one they started families.

Evie learned to paint. Her idol was John Joseph Turner, who seemed able to capture light on canvas. To the end of her days, she sketched and painted with gusto. But when she entered her 20s, she found that art did not feed her soul.

Evie was 30 when she spent a few weeks in Australia, helping a sister. Sailing home, she sensed a divine calling to be a missionary. Yet how was she to break the news to father? The arrival of a young missionary from India helped. Evie found Jesse Brand too intense for her taste. But at a missionary meeting, he seemed to look directly at her as he described the filth and squalor on the mission field. She heard an unspoken question in his words: could she, a fashionable girl, handle such things? Resolve rose within her. Yes, with God's help she could! And she was riled up enough to tell her father so.

He took her announcement hard. A missionary? Aren't there enough lost souls in London? Evie insisted that she had to obey God's call. Finally, her father yielded. She could go, but she must allow him to provide her entire support. At her farewell party, she wore her usual finery. "She looks more like an actress than a missionary," said someone.