nd laughing waters that clattered
to the sea for all the world like happy children running home from
school. But the waters on Ben Grief neither laughed nor sang. Sometimes
they ran violently, as though Ben Grief were in a rage of passionate
weeping; sometimes they went sullenly as though he sulked.

It was upon Ben Grief that Marcella looked when she went to bed at night
and when she wakened in the morning in her little stark room at the back
of the house. There was another window in the room from which she could
have seen the sea, but Aunt Janet had had a great mahogany wardrobe
placed right across it, and only the sound of the sea, creeping
sometimes, lashing most often, came to her as she lay in bed, reminding
her that the sea was there all the time.

In front of the house rose Lashnagar, the home of desolation, a
billowing waste of sand rising to about a thousand feet at the crest.
Curlews called and sea-gulls screamed over Lashnagar; heather grew upon
it, purple and olive-green; fennel and cooch and henbane sprang side by
side with dwarfed stink-nettles, stunted by the salt sand in which they
were rooted. But the soil was not deep enough for trees or bushes to
take root.

In Marcella's lifetime men had been lost on Lashnagar, and sheep and
dogs, adventuring too far, had never come back. Legend had it that
hundreds of years ago Lashnagar had been a quiet little village nestling
round Castle Lashcairn, the home of Marcella's folks. That was in the
year before Flodden Field, a hot, dry time that began with Lady Day and
lasted till the Feast of All Souls without rain or storm. In that hot
summer a witch-woman, very beautiful, had come to Lashnagar to win the
soul of Andrew Lashcairn, winning with his soul his bed and his board. A
wild wooing it was, and a wilder wedding. All the wooing had been done
by the woman--as was the way of the Lashcairn women ever afterwards--in
the dry heat of that unnatural summer when the sap dried in the trees
and the marrow in men's bones, while the heated blood surged through
their veins more quickly than ever before. On the Feast of All Souls,
the wedding day, a copper sun rose in a sky of blood and lead, and all
the folks of Lashnagar drank deeply to drive away impending horror. That
night, after they slept, while Andrew Lashcairn lay awake in the
witch-woman's arms, a great wind came in from the sea, sweeping before
it the salt sand of the dunes, covering the village and the castle