clamouring for their scanty meals. And one night, when he had been out alone along Ben Grief and seen his lands and his old grey house, Lashcairn the Landless, as they called him, went back to his barrel.

For three days he lived behind the green baize door. On the fourth he came out with his red-rimmed eyes ablaze, his gaunt face pinched, his hair bedraggled. And that night a little old man, Rose's cousin from Winchester, came to see them. He had never seen the mad family into which his cousin had married; he had not seen her since she was a gentle little thing in pinafores, with a great family of wax dolls. He did not know that she was dead. Aunt Janet made no explanations; his small black eyes took in all the decay and famine of the place; his neat black Sabbatical coat looked queerly out of place in the book-room with its scarred oak refectory table, its hard oak chairs and its dusty banner hung from the ceiling above where Andrew Lashcairn sat. When his host came into the room he pulled himself to his full five feet five and his thin white face went even whiter. Andrew, in his frenzy, cursed him and God and the world, and, in the old Berserk rage, dashed over the heavy table on which Aunt Janet had set a poor meal for the stranger.

It was a wild, bizarre picture; the fire, fanned by the fierce winds that swept down the open chimney, kept sending out puffs of smoke that went like grey wraiths about the room; the top of the table rutted by hundreds of years' fierce feeding; the shattered crockery and forlorn-looking mess of food on the floor. Aunt Janet and Marcella shrunk away—her father never got one of his rages but the girl felt old agony in her broken arm—but the little white-faced cousin stood in front of Andrew's gaunt frame, which seemed twice his size.

"What's the matter, Cousin Andrew?" he asked mildly. Then, turning to the others, he said gently: "Go away for a little while. I'll have a talk with Andrew about little Rose."

They went away with Andrew's curses following them along the windy passage. Marcella waited in sympathy with the little man's arms, but after a while a murmur of normal conversation came from the room and went on until two o'clock in the morning. At last the little old cousin came to where Marcella and Aunt Janet shivered in the kitchen, and said simply:

"Andrew has cast his burden on the Lord, and now he can go on his way singing."

Marcella began to cry from sheer nervousness. She had not the faintest idea what the cousin meant, but she was to know it as time went by. For Andrew got religion as he got everything else—very thoroughly—and, just as he had superimposed Rationalism on his house and bent it before his whisky furies, now he tried to religionize it.

After two days the cousin went away and never came again. Almost it seemed as though he had never been, for he wrote not at all, simply going his serene, white-faced way through their lives for two days and two nights and dropping out of them. Marcella, telling Wullie about it, received his explanation.

"It's what I tauld ye afore, lassie. We're not things or people, really. We're juist paths."

"Was it God who came along that night?" asked Marcella doubtfully. Wullie thought it was. But she found her father's religion even more difficult than any of his other obsessions. It made him eager and pathetic. He had never tried to make drunkards of people; Marcella he had impatiently tried to make a rationalist; but now he spent all his time trying to convert them. His household was veneered with evangelism. The kindly desire to save brands from the burning sent him to the village praying and quoting the Word to those who once thought him a king, later a terror, and now could not understand him. Men coming from the fields and the boats were asked questions about their peace with God, and in the little chapel where once the Covenanters had met, Andrew Lashcairn's voice was raised in prayers and exhortations so long and so burning that he often emptied the place even of zealots before he had tired himself and God.

All the time Marcella ached with pity for him now that she feared him no longer. He seemed so naive, so wistful to her, this strange father whom she could never understand, but who seemed like a child very keen on a game of make-believe. Things went from bad to worse, but they sat down to their meal of oatcake and milk uncomplaining, after a long grace. It was never the way of the Lashcairns to notice overmuch the demands of the body. And now they sat by the almost bare refectory table, and none of them would mention hunger; Andrew did not feel it. His zeal fed him. Marcella, however, took to going down oftener to the huts and always Wullie, who sensed these things, toasted fish—three or four at a time—over the embers, and roasted potatoes in the bed of ashes.

It was in the summer following this last obsession that Andrew was taken suddenly ill. One evening, praying with blazing ardour for the souls of the whole world, consciousness of unbearable weight came upon him. Standing in the little chapel he felt that he was being pressed to his knees and there, with a terrible voice, he cried:

"Yes, Lord, put all the weight of Thy cross upon me, Thy poor servant—Thy Simon of Cyrene who so untimely, so unhelpfully hath found Thee."

Those watching believed that they saw the black shadow of a cross laid over his bowed shoulders. But then, like Andrew, they were Kelts who could see with eyes that were not apparent. Andrew was carried home to his bed, and Dr. Angus, the same doctor he had driven forth in violence from his wife's sickness, came to him.

Thorough in body as in soul, Andrew seemed called upon to bear all the woes of the world. Sometimes, watching him lying there with closed eyes and lips that moved faintly as he prayed for courage, Marcella wished she could see him once again come tearing into the room in a passion of destruction. His gentleness, his pathos, and the way he talked so quietly to God with his beautiful voice, almost tore her in two with pity.

Many nights his illness made it impossible for him to lie down, and then he would stand, wrapped in a blanket—for his dressing-gown had long since been torn to shreds—his hands clutching the post of his ancient bed, his eyes gazing deeply at the faded sun in splendour on the tapestry back of the bed while he read slowly the old boastful motto, "By myself I stand." And the girl, lying on a little couch where she took turns with Aunt Janet in nursing him through the night, would hear him talking to God by the hour.

"Not by myself, O Lord, but in Thy might. Thou art my Rock and my Fortress, my Defence on my right hand, my strong shield in whom I trust—"

Silence—except for the grating of rats in the ceiling as they tried to gnaw the beams, and the moaning of the wind. Then the musical voice would say, with infinite tenderness:

"He hath said thy foot shall not be moved. Thy keeper shall never, never slumber nor sleep. O Lord, I am not asking Thee a very great thing, for already Thou hast done wondrous things for me. This is a little thing, O Thou that never sleepest! Give me ten minutes' rest, ten minutes' sleep. To Thee a thousand years are but as yesterday. To me, O Lord, in this weariness, a night is as a thousand years."

Helped by Marcella he would clamber into bed again, shutting his eyes, waiting on the Lord, only to start up as the pumping of his worn-out, strained heart almost choked him. And then, leaning back on heaped pillows he would look out through the dark window and say, very humbly:

"Most patient hast Thou been with me, Oh Lord, when Thou wast seeking me so far. Most patient must I be with Thee—I, who have no claim upon Thy mercy save Thy own most holy kindliness to me."

And so the night would wear on; sometimes he would talk to God, sometimes to Marcella, telling her how he had hated her because she was not a boy and seemed, to his great strength, too much like her frail English mother to be of any use in the