g."

There was a solemn stillness after this conversation. Thora sat bent
over beside the fire musing. Margaret, wearied with the feelings which
her interview with Snorro had called forth, rested upon the sofa; she
was suffering, and the silence and melancholy of her mother seemed
almost a wrong to her. It was almost as if she had taken Jan's part.

A knock at the door startled both women. Thora rose and opened it. It
was Jan. "Mother," he said, "I want to see my wife and child."

"Margaret, speak for thyself."

"I dare not see Jan. Tell him so."

Thora repeated the message.

"Ask Margaret if that is her last word to me?"

Mechanically Thora asked the question, and after an agonizing pause
Margaret gasped out, "Yes, yes--until--"

"Ask her to stand a moment at the window with the child. I long to see
them." Then he turned to go to the window, and Thora shut the door.
But it was little use repeating Jan's request, Margaret had fainted,
and lay like one dead, and Thora forgot every thing till life returned
to her daughter. Then as the apparent unkindness was irrevocable and
unexplainable, she said nothing of it. Why should she add to the
sorrow Margaret was suffering?

And as for Jan, the universal opinion was that he ought to suffer. He
had forfeited his wife, and his home, and his good name, and he had
lost his boat. When a man has calamity upon calamity the world
generally concludes that he must be a very wicked man to deserve them.
Perhaps the world is right; but it is also just possible that the
world, even with its six thousand years of gathered wisdom, may be
wrong.

CHAPTER VII.

THE MAN AT DEATH'S DOOR.

"Thoughts hardly to be packed
Into a narrow act,
Fancies that broke through language and escaped,
All I could never be,
All men ignored in me,
This I was worth to God, whose wheel the pitcher shaped."

It must be remembered, however, that Margaret was bound by ties whose
strength this generation can hardly conceive. The authority of a
father over a child in England and Scotland is still a very decided
one. Fifty years ago in Shetland it was almost absolute. Margaret
believed the fifth commandment to be as binding upon her as the first.
From her childhood it had been pointed out to her as leading all the
six defining our duty to our fellow-creatures. Therefore if she
thought her father's orders regarding Jan unkind, the possibility of
disobeying them