It was many years since she had consciously prayed, but now she thought of her father’s prayers, and whispered: 

“God—­You know all about this muddle of mine.  You gave Louis to me so that, in the end, he might be a path for You to walk along.  I’ve tried to be a path for You towards him, but I thought I’d better help You along.  I couldn’t keep quiet.  Oh how silly of me!  God, I see now that I’ve been all wrong.  I’ve been keeping him out of the world when I ought, all the time, to have been making him brave enough to face the evil in the world.  Please God, let me be quiet now—­and not keep tripping You up with my own ideas, my own strength when You walk along my life.”

Her quick imagination, the imagination of a savage or a child, saw pictures where other people would have seen ethical ideas.  She went on, softly: 

“Walk over me with burning Feet.  Oh don’t worry, please, about how much it hurts, so long as You get to him in the end.  Because I love him—­and because he is the one You gave to me—­the man I needed.”

She stood up slowly, and felt that, at last, she had given in.  The poor baby lay blissfullly asleep beside her on the ground.  She took him in her arms and carried him home Then she sat down with pen and ink and wrote a letter.  She was not sure when it would be posted, but she decided to get it written, at any rate.  She felt fey—­she felt that she was being led, now that she had asked to be kept quiet at last.

She wrote: 

“‘CASTLE LASHCAIRN’
(It isn’t really a castle.  It’s a hut).

“DEAR PROFESSOR KRAILL,

“Ever since I was fifteen you have been the very heart of my imagination.  I used to read your lectures to my father, and because I’ve never been to school I had to get a dictionary to two words on every line.  You enlightened me, and depressed me, and shocked me and annoyed me all at once in those days.  But in your last Edinburgh lecture it seems to me that the spirit of God has come upon you to lead captivity captive. (I think that is such a beautiful sentence I can’t help putting it in a letter to you, because I would like to write to you in beautiful words.) I would like to quote some more of the Bible to you, but you can read it for yourself.  The fifth chapter of the second book of Kings—­the story of Naaman the leper.  I am the servant maid in that story, and I’ve just discovered that I’ve been trying to cure my lord’s illness with lumps of cotton-wool.  There is someone at home in Scotland who sends me all your lectures, and when I read the last ones I felt that you were the prophet in Samaria.  I hear that you are lecturing in Sydney soon.  I would come to hear you, but I can’t leave my little kingdom here.  And I don’t think they’d approve of my small son at a University lecture.  He is only two, and very busy always.  I feel that, if I could talk to you, I should see a great light; you seem such a very shining person to me.  And I’m a duffer.  A well-meaning duffer with a task before her that needs brains.  You talk of the socialization of knowledge—­will you begin the socialization on my behalf?  I wonder if you would like to see what life in the Bush is like, you who are a student of life?  Then you could show me where Jordan is nowadays.