ople, I did not really belong to any one, and I did not know that this
was unusual. One of my early memories is that I heard an under-nursemaid
say to another this curious thing: "Both her father and mother were dead
when she was born." I did not even know that was a remarkable thing to
say until I was several years older and Jean Braidfute told me what had
been meant.

My father and mother had both been very young and beautiful and
wonderful. It was said that my father was the handsomest chieftain in
Scotland, and that his wife was as beautiful as he was. They came to
Muircarrie as soon as they were married and lived a splendid year there
together. Sometimes they were quite alone, and spent their days fishing
or riding or wandering on the moor together, or reading by the fire in
the library the ancient books Angus Macayre found for them. The library
was a marvelous place, and Macayre knew every volume in it. They used
to sit and read like children among fairy stories, and then they would
persuade Macayre to tell them the ancient tales he knew--of the days
when Agricola forced his way in among the Men of the Woods, who would
die any savage death rather than be conquered. Macayre was a sort of
heirloom himself, and he knew and believed them all.

I don't know how it was that I myself seemed to see my young father and
mother so clearly and to know how radiant and wildly in love they
were. Surely Jean Braidfute had not words to tell me. But I knew. So I
understood, in a way of my own, what happened to my mother one brilliant
late October afternoon when my father was brought home dead--followed by
the guests who had gone out shooting with him. His foot had caught in a
tuft of heather, and his gun in going off had killed him. One moment
he had been the handsomest young chieftain in Scotland, and when he was
brought home they could not have let my mother see his face.

But she never asked to see it. She was on the terrace which juts over
the rock the castle is built on, and which looks out over the purple
world of climbing moor. She saw from there the returning party of
shooters and gillies winding its way slowly through the heather,
following a burden carried on a stretcher of fir boughs. Some of her
women guests were with her, and one of them said afterward that when she
first caught sight of the moving figures she got up slowly and crept
to the stone balustrade with a crouching movement almost like a young
leopardess pre