In Greenvoe, Mrs McKee sits, wracked with guilt and fear. She remembers a family holiday to the west coast of Scotland, where, during a sudden onslaught of rain, she pulls her young niece into an open doorway and turns to speak to her:

The seeds for Winnie's future faith are sown in this moment. The girl later becomes a Scottish literary convert – the author of a historical novel named The Stag at Bay, in which the Young Pretender, Charles Edward Stuart, takes refuge one evening in a similarly important, half-ruined chapel. Winnie's conversion scene in Greenvoe closely parallels the experience of Robert McNish in George Scott-Moncrieff's novel Death's Bright Shadow, where Robert is deeply affected by Mass in a faded and worn Highland chapel. But though both Brown and Scott-Moncrieff share comparable visual imagery to illuminate the ‘tacky aesthetics’ of popular Catholic devotion, Brown focuses especially closely on Marian veneration in Greenvoe.

As the scene progresses, Winnie and her aunt watch an old, blind woman genuflect with some difficulty. The woman lights a small votive candle in front of the statue of the Virgin: