ves. In her
heart, deeper down than her faith could reach, lay a conviction that
the Faes and Thorkels who had sailed those seas for centuries had
"called" her boys to them. And she was always nursing an accusation
against herself for a rite which she had observed for their welfare,
but which she was now sure had been punished by their death. For
often, when they had been tossing on the black North Sea, she had gone
to the top of the hill, and looking seaward she had raised from the
past the brown-sailed ships, and the big yellow-haired men tugging at
their oars; and in her heart there had been a supplication to their
memory, which Peter, had he known it, would have denounced, with the
sternest wrath, as neither more nor less than a service to Satan.

But what do we know of the heart nearest to our own? What do we know
of our own heart? Some ancestor who sailed with Offa, or who fought
with the Ironsides, or protested with the Covenanters, or legislated
with the Puritans, may, at this very hour, be influencing us, in a way
of which we never speak, and in which no other soul intermeddles.

Thora had one comfort. Her daughter was of a spirit akin to her own.
Peter had sent her to Edinburgh, hoping that she would bring back to
his northern home some of those lowland refinements of which he had a
shadowy and perhaps exaggerated idea. But Margaret Fae's character
was not of that semi-fluid nature which can easily be run into new
molds. She had looked with distrust and dislike upon a life which
seemed to her artificial and extravagant, and had come back to
Shetland with every Norse element in her character strengthened and
confirmed.

What then made her betroth herself to Jan Vedder? A weak, wasteful
man, who had little but his good-natured, pleasant ways and his great
beauty to recommend him. And yet the wise and careful Margaret Fae
loved him; loved him spontaneously, as the brook loves to run, and the
bird loves to sing.

"But bear in mind, husband," said Thora, on the night of the
betrothal, "that this thing is of thy own doing. Thou hired Jan
Vedder, when thou couldst well have hired a better man. Thou brought
him to thy house. Well, then, was there any wonder that ill-luck
should follow the foolish deed?"

"Wife, the lad is a pleasant lad. If he had money to even Margaret's
tocher, and if he were more punctual at the ordinances, there would be
no fault to him."

"So I think, too. But when a man has not religion,