CHAPTER VII.
THE MAN AT DEATH’S DOOR.
“Thoughts hardly to be packed
Into a narrow act,
Fancies that broke through language and escaped,
All I could never be,
All men ignored in me,
This I was worth to God, whose wheel the pitcher shaped.”
It must be remembered, however, that Margaret was bound by ties whose strength this generation can hardly conceive. The authority of a father over a child in England and Scotland is still a very decided one. Fifty years ago in Shetland it was almost absolute. Margaret believed the fifth commandment to be as binding upon her as the first. From her childhood it had been pointed out to her as leading all the six defining our duty to our fellow-creatures. Therefore if she thought her father’s orders regarding Jan unkind, the possibility of disobeying them never presented itself.