ter that Marcella
slept in a cave of winds. It never occurred to her to rebel against her
father. She accepted the things done to her body with complete docility.
Over the things that happened to her mind her father could have no
control.

But his Spartan training had a queer effect upon her. Always meagrely
fed, always knowing the very minimum of comfort, she became oblivious to
food or comfort for herself; she became unconscious, independent of her
body save as a means of locomotion, but she cared immensely for other
people's. She shivered to think of Wullie's brother Tammas and his son
Jock out fishing in the night with icy salt water pouring over chafed
hands, soaking through their oilskins; she cried after a savagely silent
meal of herrings and oatcake when she had not noticed what she was
eating, to think of the villagers with nothing but herrings and
oatcakes. She hated to think of things hungry, things in pain. She even
felt a great, inarticulate pity for her father. For all his striding
autocracy and high-handedness there was something naive and childish
about him that clutched at her heart. He was like Ben Grief, alone and
bare when the winds tore.

He was thorough, was Andrew Lashcairn. Finding the young student's
"Riddle of the Universe" in the book-room one day he read it idly. It
started him on a course of philosophy in which he determined to include
Marcella. From Edinburgh came boxes of books--and a queer assortment of
books they were. Locke and Berkeley, James' "Natural Religion," Renan's
"Life of Christ," a very bad translation of Lucretius; Frazer's "Golden
Bough," a good deal of Huxley and Darwin, and many of the modern
writers. They were something amazingly new to him, and Marcella used to
watch him sitting in the fireless book-room with a candle flickering
while the wind soughed round the house and in through every chink in the
worn walls. His fine grey eyes were deep sunken; when he looked up
suddenly there was sometimes a little light of madness in them that made
her recoil instinctively; his thick hair was greyish, whitening over the
temples; his high Keltic cheekbones were gaunter than ever, his forehead
and mouth lined with past rages. He had never held a religion--the
Lashcairn religion had been a jumble of superstition, ancestor-worship
and paganism on which a Puritan woman marrying a Lashcairn in the
middle seventeenth century had grafted her dour faith. It had
flourished--something hard