n to a noble creed; accept it with
thankfulness and without demur. You are not called upon to understand
it or to reason about it. It is faith that conquers."

And after such an oration the young minister would go away with a
proud sense of duty well performed, burning with his own evangel,
and liking David well for being the invoker of his enthusiasm. But
David, after his departure, was always silent and depressed; his
intellect may have been quickened, but he was not comforted.

The sunshine that had brightened his life during the past year was
gone, for he had found out that all his happiness was bound up in
Nanna, and Nanna was on the verge of despair. Day by day she grew
thinner and whiter, more melancholy and more silent. She did only
work enough to supply the barest needs of life, and for the most
part sat hour after hour with dropped hands and closed eyes; or she
was seized with a restlessness that drove her to motion, and then
she walked the small bounds of her room until physical exhaustion
threw her into deep sleep.

David watched her with a sad patience. He had felt severely the
loss of Vala, and he did not presume to measure Nanna's sorrow by
his own. He knew it was natural that for some weeks she should weep
for a child so dear, whose little life had been so pitifully wronged,
so bound to suffering, so cruelly cut short. But when this natural
sorrow was not healed by time, when Nanna nursed her grief to despair
and dwelt with it in the valley of the shadow of death, he thought it
time to reason with her.

"You will kill yourself, Nanna," he said.

"Well, then, David, I hate life."

"Do you wish to die?"

"No; I am afraid to die. I know that I am sinning every day in
weeping for my poor lost bairn, and yet I am that way made that
I cannot help but weep for her. For it is my fault, David, all my
fault. Why, then, did He pursue the child with His anger from the
first hour of her sorrowful life to the last? And where is she now?
O David, where is she? If God would only let me go to her!"

"_Whist_, Nanna! You know not what you are saying. You might be
asking yourself away from His presence."

"I would rather be with Vala. If that be sinful, let me thole the
wages of my sin. Where is my dear bairn?"

"I heard Elder Kennoch say we may have a hope that God will
eventually take pity on those babes who have done no actual sin."

"But _when_ will he take pity? And until he does, how can the wee
souls