To Blackstone he wrote explaining that he had not felt able to join in the picnics and the lighter side of the Kuling conference partly because he had a sense that his father's illness was growing much worse.18 Buchman had, in fact, known for many months that his father's condition was deteriorating. A letter from his mother the previous Christmas had made it clear that his father's behaviour was now totally irrational and that she herself went in fear of what the old man might do to her.

'I cannot see how I can hold out any longer,' she had written in December 1917, 'it is so serious I don't know which way to turn. This week he was ready to go off and they kept him back from the train. I am in constant fear, the only hope I have is the Lord.'19

By the summer of the following year, the tone other letters had become even more desperate. In June she wrote that 'your father left this morning with his suitcase, he told me he did not know when he would return. I am writing this with tears. I never thought I could go through what I am now …. your mission is at home.'20 At the end of July one of their neighbours in Allentown wrote to confirm that his mother was no longer safe at home. Something, she said, would have to be done.21

Then, while he was in Port Arthur, his mother wrote to say that the old man had been taken into hospital on doctor's orders. 'We had to take him,' she explained, 'this is hard to tell you, Frank, to take him out of his good home. He chased me through the house Monday morning in my nightclothes from one end of the house to the other and threatened. I left home and hid at Hirner's that day. They took him away very quietly, without a scene but, oh think of it, out of his home.'22

The astonishing thing is that, even now, Buchman did not set out post-haste for Allentown. One factor was the length of time which mail and travel, both by surface, took in those days. Partly because of this, there was also a tradition among Americans and Europeans, serving either as missionaries or in a civil capacity, to stick to their work abroad whatever the difficulties at home. Certainly, Buchman felt convinced at the time that he was where God meant him to be. 'I know just how much you want me,' he wrote to his mother from Peitaiho in August 1918, 'and I just want to do God's will.'23 He sent fond letters regularly, often accompanied by presents or gifts of money - $300 for his mother's birthday - but never gave even the slightest hint that he was in any uncertainty that he must stay in the East. Indeed, at one point he suggested that she join him in China, presumably putting his father under suitable care.

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