“Was it God’s will? It was a great sin, and God has never punished him for it. Lassie, you little ken.”
“No, grandfather, but God kens. And it was His will,” repeated Katie, not knowing what to say.
“God’s will! Ay, since He permitted it; we can say nothing else. But that it should be God’s will that yon man should have a name and a place here—and it may be, hereafter—passes me.”
Except to his wife, Mr Fleming had never spoken such words before, and the pain and anger on his face it was sorrowful to see.
“Grandfather, don’t you mind how, at the very last, our Lord said, ‘Father, forgive them’?”
He had been sitting, with his face averted from her, but he turned now with a strange, dazed look in his eyes:
“Ay. And He said, ‘Love your enemies,’ and ‘Forgive and ye shall be forgiven.’ And Katie, my bonny woman, I canna do it.”
Katie slid down to the ground beside him, and laid her wet face on his knee without a word. What was there to be said, only “God comfort him, God comfort him?” and she said it many times in the silence that came next.
By and by the clouds drifted toward the west and hid the sun, and it seemed to grow dreary and chill around them.
“We’ll go to the house to your grandmother,” said he at last in a voice that to Katie seemed hard and strange.