minister?"

"This is what happened; for, David, God's will must be done. No
one came here but the doctor. On the second day he said, 'She is
not very sick.' At his next visit he said, 'She will die.' Then I
told him the child was not baptized, and prayed him to go for the
minister. And he said he would certainly do so. But he was called
here and there, and he forgot that day; and the next morning very
early he went to the manse, and the minister had gone away; and
the great storm kept him away for three days; so when he got back
the message had been overlaid by many others."

"O Nanna! Nanna!"

"Yes, it was so. After the storm the doctor came again, and Vala was
dying. And then he rode like a man riding for his life, and spoke
very angrily to the minister, who was not to blame at all, and the
minister was hurt at his words; but he came that afternoon, and it
was _too late_."

"O Nanna! O Vala! Vala! Vala!"

"So the minister was angry with me for my delays, and he spoke the
hard truth to me, and every word went to my soul like a sword. I
thought I should die that night, and I longed to die. There was no
friend to say to me one word of comfort, and I did not dare to pray.
I was feared God would ask me, 'Where is your child?' O David, what
for at all did God make us? For this life is full of sorrow, and
it is little comfort to be told that there is a worse one after it."

David took her hand, and a tear dropped upon her slender brown
fingers; but he did not answer her question. Indeed, he could
not. The same bewildering inquiry had haunted his own sad life.
So much sorrow and pain, and at the end perhaps to be "hardly
saved," while all around innumerable souls were going down, without
hope or helper, to eternal wrath! What for at all had God made man
for such a fate?

For that he had _not_ made man for such ends was a fact outside their
understandings, even as a possibility; and its very suggestion at
this hour would have appeared to both an impiety of the worst kind.
So they consoled each other in the only way possible to souls at
once so miserable and so submissive. With clasped hands they wept
together over the inscrutable fate which had set them so hard a
lesson to learn as life, with so little light to learn it by.

Natural events deepened the gloom of this spiritual thraldom. Storms
of unusual severity swept over the bare, brown land, and the fishing
was not only dangerous, but often impossible. But Davi