w consumption that wasted her away."

"Was there none of you to comfort her?"

"It is true, David, that the child was never baptized," said
Christine; "so, then, what comfort could there be for her? And
then she began to think that God had never loved her."

"Thanks to the Best, she knows now how far wrong she was," said
David, fervently; "she knows now that his love is from everlasting
to everlasting. Her poor heart, wearied with so many sorrows and
troubled by so many fears, has tasted one supreme happiness--that
God is love."

"She thought for sure that he was continually angry with her. 'If
he had cared for my soul,' she said to me, one day, 'he would not
have let me marry Nicol Sinclair. He would have kept his hand about
me until my cousin David Borson came from the Hebrides. And if he
had cared for my poor bairn he would not, by this and that, have
prevented the minister coming to baptize her."

"Was she long ill?" asked David.

"At the beginning of last winter she became too ill to go to the
ordinances, and too feared to open her Bible, lest she should read
her own condemnation in it; and so gradually she seemed to lose all
hope, either for this life or the next one. And folk wearied of her
complaining, I think."

"The elders and the minister, did they not try to comfort her?"

"At first Elder Peterson and Elder Hoag came to see her; but Nanna
put strange questions to them--questions they could not answer;
and they said the minister could not answer them, either--no, nor
the whole assembly of the kirk of Scotland. And I was hearing that
the minister was angered by her words and her doubting, and he
told her plainly 'women had no call to speer after the "why" of
God's purposes.' And indeed, David, she was very outspoken,--for she
was fretful with pain and fever,--and she told him that she was
not thankful to go to hell for the glory and honor of God, and that,
moreover, she did not want to go to heaven if Vala was not there.
And when the minister said, '_Whist_, woman!'--for he was frightened
at her words,--she would not be still, but went on to wonder how
fathers and mothers could be happy, even in the very presence of
God, if their sons and daughters were wandering in the awful outer
darkness; and, moreover, she said she was not grateful to God for
life, and she thought her consent to coming into life on such hard
terms ought to have been first asked."

And Christine looked at David, and ceased speak