ave
a reasonable hope--"

"Hope! No, no, David! I must have something better than hope. I hoped
for Vala, and my hope has been my hell. And as for the child--my God!
where is the child?"

"We love God, Nanna, and the children of the righteous--"

"Are no safer than the children of the wicked, David. I have thought
of this continually. There was John Beaton's son; he killed a man,
and died on the gallows-tree, to the shame and the heartbreak of
his good father and mother. The lad had been baptized, too,--given to
God when he drew his first breath,--and God must have rejected
him. Minister Stuart's son forged a note, and was sent with felons
across the sea. His father and mother had prayed for him all the
days of his life; he was brought to the kirk and given to God in
baptism; and God must have rejected him also. Think of good Stephen
and Anna Blair's children. Their daughter's name cannot be spoken
any more, and their sons are bringing down their gray hairs with
sorrow to the grave--with sorrow and shame too. Go through the
whole kirk, the whole town, the islands themselves, and you will
be forced to say, David, that it is the children of the righteous
that go to the devil."

"Nanna! Nanna!"

"It is the truth, David. How the good God can treat his bairns so, I
know not; but you and I may also deserve his wrath in like manner.
I am feared to hope different. O David, I am feared to be a mother
again!"

"Nanna! Nanna! what can I say?"

"There is nothing to say. If I should meet Vala in that place where
infants 'earnestly desire to see and love God, and yet are not able
to do so,' I should cover my face before the child. If she blamed me,
I should shiver in speechless agony; if she did not blame me, it
would be still harder to bear. Were we only sure--but we are not
sure."

"_We are not sure._" David repeated the words with a sad
significance. Nanna's argument, evolved from her own misery and
illustrated by that misery, had been before David's eyes for
months. He could not escape from such reasoning and from such
proof, and his whole life, education, and experience went to
enforce the pitiful dilemma in which their love had placed them.

"It is His will, and we must bear it to the uttermost," continued
Nanna, with a sorrowful resignation.

"I am very wretched, Nanna."

"So am I, David, very wretched indeed. I used to think monks and
nuns, and such as made a merit of not marrying, were all wrong; maybe
they