have such huge, gaunt bodies and looked at her with such mournful eyes
when she went through the croft in which they were eating the scanty
grass. The two old horses who did the ploughing and the harvesting
had ribs that she could count, that felt sharp when she stroked their
patient sides. The cows lowed a great deal--very plaintively and deep;
the pigs squealed hungrily every time a pail clattered in the kitchen or
steps passed their sty door.

One dreadful day they squealed all the time while Marcella's little
English mother lay on her couch in the window that looked over
Lashnagar, and cried. She had lain on this couch for nearly two years
now, whiter and thinner every day. Marcella adored her and used to kiss
her white, transparent hands, and call her by the names of queens and
goddesses in the legends she had read, trying to stretch her own ten
years of experience to match her mother's thirty-five so that she could
be her friend. And this day when Rose Lashcairn cried because the beasts
were crying with hunger and there was no food for them, Marcella thought
of Jeannie Deans and Coeur de Lion and Sir Galahad. Buckling on her
armour in the shape of an old coat made of the family plaid, and a Tam
o' Shanter, she went out to do battle for the helpless creatures who
were hungry, and stop her mother's tears.

It was a three-mile walk to the little town. There was a corn factor's
shop there at which her father dealt. She walked in proudly. It was
market day and the place was full of people.

"Andrew Lashcairn says ye'll please to be sending up a sack of meal and
a sack of corn the day," she said calmly to the factor who looked at her
between narrowing eyes. The factor was a man imported to the district:
he had not the feudal habit of respect for decayed lordship.