ung her
across the room, breaking her thin little arm. She remembered ever
afterwards how he had picked her up, suddenly quietened, and set and
bandaged the arm without the suspicion of tenderness or apology or
shame, but with cool skill. All the time she heard his teeth grinding,
and watched his red-rimmed grey eyes blazing. She gathered that he
considered his women-folk belonged to him, and that he could break their
arms at will.

Other things she remembered, too--cries in the night from her mother's
room when she had been a tiny mite and thought they were the cries of
banshees or ghosts; she remembered a terrible time nearly three years
ago when she must not sit on her mother's knee and lay her head on her
breast because of cruel pain there; she remembered the frightening scene
there had been when surgeons had come and stayed in her mother's room
for hours; how they had gone past her where she cowered in the passage,
smelling a queer, sweet, choking smell that came out when they opened
the door. In the book room she had heard raised voices when the
Edinburgh surgeon had said, "In my opinion it was caused by a blow--it
cannot have come in that particular position except by injury--a blow,
Mr. Lashcairn."

There had been a Berserk rage then, and violence before which the
doctors had been driven away.

All these things Marcella remembered during her lonely three-mile walk
in the winter twilight, and for the first time they co-ordinated with
other things, broke through her mist of dream and legend and stood out
stark like the summit of Ben Grief.

That night she was more than usually tender to her mother. Kneeling
beside her bed, she put her strong young arms under the bedclothes and
held her very tight. Through her nightgown she felt very frail--Marcella
could touch the sharp bones, and thought of the poor starved cows.

"My queen, my beautiful," she whispered in her mother's ear. "I'm going
to be Siegfried and save you from the dragon--I'm going to take you
away, darling--pick you right up in my arms and run away with you--"

She stopped, choked by her intensity, while her mother stroked her
ruffled hair and smiled faintly.

"You can't take people up in your arms and snatch them out of life,
childie," she said. And then they kissed good night.

As she went to her little cold room Marcella heard the padding of feet
outside in the croft, and grunts and squeals. The hungry beasts, as a
last resort, had been turn