ears.

It was a three-mile walk to the little town. There was a corn factor's
shop there at which her father dealt. She walked in proudly. It was
market day and the place was full of people.

"Andrew Lashcairn says ye'll please to be sending up a sack of meal and
a sack of corn the day," she said calmly to the factor who looked at her
between narrowing eyes. The factor was a man imported to the district:
he had not the feudal habit of respect for decayed lordship.

"Indeed he does? And why disna Andrew Lashcairn come tae dae his own
begging?"

Marcella stared at him and her eyes flashed with indignation though her
knees were trembling.

"He is not begging, Mr. Braid. But the beasts are crying for food and
he's needin' the corn the night."

The people in the shop stopped talking about prices and listened
greedily. They knew what Marcella did not.

"Then ye'll tell him tae go on needin'. When he's paid for the last
sack, an' the one afore that, he'll be gettin' more."

"But of course he'll pay," she cried. "My father is busy, and he can't
mind things always. If you ask him, he'll pay."

The man laughed.

"He will, fine he will! No, Mistress Marcella, ye can tell yer father
not tae go sendin' children beggin' for credit whiles he hugs his bar'l.
The corn's here safe enough when he chooses to pay for't."

Marcella went homewards, her mind a maelstrom of conflict. She knew
nothing about money; it had never occurred to her that her father had
none, and the cryptic allusion to the "bar'l" was even more puzzling.
She knew that her father was a man to be feared, but he had always been
the same; she expected nothing else of him, or of fathers generally. She
knew that he lived most of his time in the little room looking out on
Lashnagar and she had certainly seen the "bar'l"--a thirty-six gallon
barrel being taken into that room. She did not know that it held whisky;
if she had known, it would have conveyed nothing to her. She knew that
the green baize door leading to the passage from which her father's room
opened must never be approached; she knew that her father had frequent
fits of Berserk rage when the little English mother cowered and fainted
and things were smashed to splinters. In one such rage, when Marcella
was seven years old, he had seen her staring and frowning at him, and
the rage he always felt against her because she, the last of his race,
was a girl and not a boy, had crystallized. That time he had fl