She nodded upward. Her father made no reply. He was not a religious man, but had thought it right to tell the child that there was some one called God, who lived above the sky, and who knew when people did wrong. “He has all outdoors,” Isla went on. “I should think He would hate a house, even if it was big. Do you suppose they try to fool Him with the coloured windows, Giles?” Giles thought this unlikely; perhaps they supposed He might feel more at home where ’twas coloured and pretty, he added, trying to fall into the child’s mood. The girl was silent. “Is He dumb, Giles, do you think?” she asked presently. “I don’t know,” said Giles. “He never spoke to me. What are you thinking of, Isla Heron?” “Oh—only I hear like voices sometimes in the wind, and down by the shore more times; and I wondered, that was all. Do you suppose ever He would speak to a girl, Giles?” “Sooner than any one else!” said Giles Heron. “He’s good, you’re sure?” “Yes, they all say He’s good.” Then Giles made the sign for silence, for his heart seemed to lie cold and beat heavily; and Isla fell a-dreaming, feeling the stillness as home. CHAPTER III. SPRING AND THE CHILDREN. SPRING came at last, waking slowly, as it does on the rocks out at sea. Giles Heron, from his doorway, watched the green creeping slowly through the dry, russet grass, and felt a faint stirring at his heart; this was his last spring on the pleasant earth, and he could think of nothing homelike that he might look forward to. God was good, probably, and ’twas likely things were going as they should; but it looked cold and dark ahead. He liked to feel the bones of the rocks warming through, as the sun rose higher, and the yellow beams grew stronger. He hailed every waking smell of leaves, of new grass, of wet, softening mould. His chief delight was to lie down on the dense carpet of trailing yew that spread a few yards from his cottage door, and feel it curl and close round him thick and fragrant; he smiled as he remembered the island legend of the yew’s closing so once round a man who had landed on the south rocks with some evil intent,—Giles, in his weakness, could not remember what evil,—closing round him and holding him so a prisoner, till the fishermen heard his starving cries, and rescued him, and carried him over to the main with a warning, scarcely needed, never to set foot on the island again.