is lands that lie about
Carlossie. The old grey house and the fields all about Ben Grief and
Lashnagar were lost by your father. All he's got now is Lashnagar and
the farm-house. And Lashnagar canna be sold because it hasna any value.
Else he'd have sold it, to put it in his bar'l."

She said nothing. Her tired eyes looked out over the farm and the
desolate hill, her hair, streaming in the wind, suddenly wrapped her
face, blinding her. As she struggled with it, light came, and she turned
to Wullie.

"It was the barrel, then, that made father ill?"

"It was so."

"And grandfather, and his father--did they get ill, too, through the
barrel?"

He shook his head, and she snatched at his arm roughly.

"Wullie, ye're to tell me. I'm telling ye ye're to tell me, Wullie. I
never heard of them. How did they die? I shall ask father if you don't
tell me."

"Your great-grandfather killed his son in a quarrel, when your father
was a bit laddie of four. The next day he was found dead beside his
bar'l in the cellar."

The storm-water went swirling down by their feet, brown and frothing. It
went down and down as though Ben Grief were crying hopelessly for this
wild people he had cradled.

"I see, now, why he's glad I'm not a boy. Wullie--do all the Lashcairns
die--like that?" and she pictured again her father waiting, as he put
it, to be drowned in his bed while a procession of killed and killing
ancestors seemed to glide before her eyes over the rushing water.

"The men folk, yes. They canna rule themselves."

"And the women?" she said sharply, realizing that she and Aunt Janet
were all that were left.

"They keep away from the bar'l."

"Yes, I couldn't imagine Aunt Janet doing that," she said, smiling
faintly. "Or me."

"Some of the women rule themselves," he said tentatively. "There was
the witch-woman first--and later there was the Puritan woman. They seem
to mother your women between them. There's never any telling which it'll
be."

"Aunt Janet--" began Marcella.

"She's ruled herself. Some of the Lashcairn women wouldna think of
ruling themselves. Then they go after the man they need, like the
witch-woman. And--take him."

Marcella frowned.

"It sends them on strange roads sometimes," said Wullie, and would say
no more.

It was Marcella's rest night, and tired as she was, she lay thinking
long in the silence. It was a strangely windless night, but her thoughts
went whirling as though on wings of wind. T