Christine Yell had seen David enter the cottage, and after an hour had passed she went to the door intending to speak to him; but she heard the solemn, mysterious voice of the man praying, and she went away and called her neighbors, Margaret Jarl and Elga Fae and Thora Thorson. And they talked of David a little, and then Magnus Thorson, the father-in-law of Thora, being a very old man, went alone into Nanna's cottage to see David. And after a while the women were called, and Christine took with her a plate of fish and bread which she had prepared; and David was glad of their sympathy. They sat down outside the door. The tender touch of the gray gloaming softened the bleak cliffs and the brown moorland, and the heavens were filled with stars. Then softly and solemnly Christine spoke of Nanna's long, hard fight with death, and of the spiritual despair which had intensified her suffering. "It was in season and out of season that she was at Vala's grave," said Christine, "and kneeling and lying on the cold ground above her; and the end was--what could only be looked for--a cough and a fever, and the slow 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?"