But the woman set before David a pot of tea and some oat-cake, and she fried him a fresh herring, and he ate with the delayed hunger of healthy youth, heartily and with pleasure. And as he did so she talked to him of his father Liot, whom she had known in her girlhood; and David told her of Liot's long, hard fight with death, and she said with a kind of sad pride: "Yes; that way Liot was sure to fare to his long home. He would set his teeth and fight for his life. Was it always well between him and you?" "He was hard and silent, but I could always lean on him as much as I liked." "That is a good deal to say." "So I think." Then they drew the past from the eternity into which it had fallen, that they two, brought so strangely together, might look at it between them. They talked of Liot's hard life and hard death for an hour, and then the woman said: "Paul Borson was of the same kind--silent, but full of deeds; and his daughter Nanna, she also has a great heart." "Show me now where she lives, and I will go and see her. Also, tell me your name." "I am Barbara Traill. When you have seen Nanna come back here, and I will give you a place to sleep and a little meat; and as soon as it is well with you it will be easy to pay my charges." "If there is no room for me in my cousin's house I will come back to you." So Barbara walked with him to the end of the street, and pointed out a little group of huts on the distant moor. "Go into the first one," she said; "it is Nanna Sinclair's. And be sure and keep to the trodden path, for outside of it there are bogs that no man knows the bottom of." Then David went forward alone, and his heart fell, and a somber look crept like a cloud over his face. This was not the home-coming he had anticipated--this poor meal at a stranger's fireside. He had been led to think that his cousin Paul had a large house and the touch of money-getting. "He and his will be well off," Liot had affirmed more than once. And one day, while he yet could stand in the door of his hut, he had looked longingly northward and said, "Oh, if I could win home again! Paul would make a fourteen days' feast to welcome me." The very vagueness of these remarks had given strength to David's imagination. He had hoped for things larger than his knowledge, and he had quite forgotten to take into his calculations the fact that as the years wear on they wear out love and life, and leave little but graves behind them. At this hour he felt his destiny to be hard and unlovely, and the text learned as one of the pillars of his faith, "Jacob have I loved, Esau have I hated," forced itself upon his reflection. A deadly fear came into his heart that the Borsons were among these hated ones. Why else did God pursue them with such sufferings and fatalities? And what could he do to propitiate this unfriendly Deity?