"The farm no longer belongs to me, your reverence. Since yesterday I've known that it belongs to Vincenz, whenever he puts in his claim. But my money, what I have besides, shall be for Joseph. If he is crippled by my fault, and cannot earn his bread,--it is my accursed guilt, and I must provide for him." "What, is it possible," cried the priest, "that your father disinherited you of house and home?" "What do I care for house and home? The home I belong to is always ready," said Wally. "Child," said the old man, much disturbed, "you would not do yourself an injury?" "No, your reverence, never now. I see now how right you are in everything, and that God Almighty will not be defied by us. Perhaps, when He sees that I truly repent, He'll have pity on me and grant peace to my weary soul." "Now blessed be the hour, hard though it may have been, that broke your proud spirit! Now Wally, you are truly great! But where are you going, my child? Will you go to some charitable refuge? Shall I take you to the Carmelites?" "No, your reverence, that would never suit the Vulture-maiden. I cannot be shut up in a cell between walls--under God's free sky, as I have lived, will I die--I should feel as if God could not come through such thick walls. I'll repent and pray as if I were in a church, but I must have the rocks and the clouds about me, and the wind whistling in my ears, or I couldn't get on at all--you understand, do you not?" "Yes, I understand, and it would be folly to try to dissuade you. But where then are you going?" "I'm going back to my father Murzoll--there is now my only home." "Do as you will," said the priest. "Go in God's name, my child--I can part from you in peace, for wherever you go now--it is back to your Father!" CHAPTER XIV. The Message of Grace. High up on the lonely Ferner, near her stony father, once more sits the outcast, solitary child of man--spell-bound, as it were, like a part of the dizzy heights from which she looks down on the little world below, in which no space could be found for the large and alien heart that had matured in the wilderness among the glacier-storms. Men have hunted and driven her forth, and that has been fulfilled that her dream foretold, the mountain has adopted her as its child. She belongs to the mountain now; stone and ice are her home--and yet she cannot turn to stone herself, and the warm and hapless human heart is silently bleeding to death up here between stone and ice.