overy, but while she lived he gave himself to her service as to that
of a living soul capable of justice and love. The night was more than
warm, but she had fits of shivering. He wrapped his coat round her,
and wiped from the poor degraded face the damps of suffering. The
woman-heart was alive still, for she took the hand that ministered to
her and kissed it with a moan. When the morning came she fell asleep.
He crept out and went to his grandmother's, where he roused Betty, and
asked her to get him some peat and coals. Finding his grandmother awake,
he told her all, and taking the coals and the peat, carried them to
the hut, where he managed, with some difficulty, to light a fire on the
hearth; after which he sat on the doorstep till Betty appeared with two
men carrying a mattress and some bedding. The noise they made awoke her.

'Dinna tak me,' she cried. 'I winna do 't again, an' I'm deein', I tell
ye I'm deein', and that'll clear a' scores--o' this side ony gait,' she
added.

They lifted her upon the mattress, and made her more comfortable than
perhaps she had ever been in her life. But it was only her illness that
made her capable of prizing such comfort. In health, the heather on a
hill-side was far more to her taste than bed and blankets. She had
a wild, roving, savage nature, and the wind was dearer to her than
house-walls. She had come of ancestors--and it was a poor little atom of
truth that a soul bred like this woman could have been born capable of
entertaining. But she too was eternal--and surely not to be fixed for
ever in a bewilderment of sin and ignorance--a wild-eyed soul staring
about in hell-fire for want of something it could not understand and had
never beheld--by the changeless mandate of the God of love! She was in
less pain than during the night, and lay quietly gazing at the fire.
Things awful to another would no doubt cross her memory without any
accompanying sense of dismay; tender things would return without moving
her heart; but Falconer had a hold of her now. Nothing could be done for
her body except to render its death as easy as might be; but something
might be done for herself. He made no attempt to produce this or that
condition of mind in the poor creature. He never made such attempts.
'How can I tell the next lesson a soul is capable of learning?' he would
say. 'The Spirit of God is the teacher. My part is to tell the good
news. Let that work as it ought, as it can, as it will.' He k