knew that he lived most of his time in the little room looking out on
Lashnagar and she had certainly seen the "bar'l"--a thirty-six gallon
barrel being taken into that room. She did not know that it held whisky;
if she had known, it would have conveyed nothing to her. She knew that
the green baize door leading to the passage from which her father's room
opened must never be approached; she knew that her father had frequent
fits of Berserk rage when the little English mother cowered and fainted
and things were smashed to splinters. In one such rage, when Marcella
was seven years old, he had seen her staring and frowning at him, and
the rage he always felt against her because she, the last of his race,
was a girl and not a boy, had crystallized. That time he had flung her
across the room, breaking her thin little arm. She remembered ever
afterwards how he had picked her up, suddenly quietened, and set and
bandaged the arm without the suspicion of tenderness or apology or
shame, but with cool skill. All the time she heard his teeth grinding,
and watched his red-rimmed grey eyes blazing. She gathered that he
considered his women-folk belonged to him, and that he could break their
arms at will.

Other things she remembered, too--cries in the night from her mother's
room when she had been a tiny mite and thought they were the cries of
banshees or ghosts; she remembered a terrible time nearly three years
ago when she must not sit on her mother's knee and lay her head on her
breast because of cruel pain there; she remembered the frightening scene
there had been when surgeons had come and stayed in her mother's room
for hours; how they had gone past her where she cowered in the passage,
smelling a queer, sweet, choking smell that came out when they opened
the door. In the book room she had heard raised voices when the
Edinburgh surgeon had said, "In my opinion it was caused by a blow--it
cannot have come in that particular position except by injury--a blow,