long black hair lay in two long plaits. Then her father came in and sent
her down to the village for the old woman who attended to the births and
deaths of people. She went over the croft, among the hungry cows that
stared at her, one after one as she passed. Later, when the woman had
gone, and the two servant women were crying in the kitchen while they
drank scalding tea and spilt it down their aprons from trembling hands,
Andrew Lashcairn and Aunt Janet sat in the book-room with all Rose
Lashcairn's papers spread out before them. Marcella sat for a while
watching.

There were letters, smelling of the lavender and rue that lay among
them. They were tied in little bundles with lavender ribbons. There were
little thin books of poetry, a few pressed flowers, a few ribbons that
had decked Baby Marcella, a tiny shirt of hers, a little shoe, a
Confirmation book. All these they threw into the fire, and read some big
crackling papers with seals and stamps upon them. Then Marcella crept
away along the passages through which the wind whistled while the rats,
hungry as everything else about Lashnagar, scuttled behind the
wainscotings.

She opened her mother's door. A candle was burning on the table by the
bedside. A sheet covered the bed. Underneath it she could trace the
outline of her mother's body. As she came across the room, walking
softly, as she always did, to avoid the loose board that had so often
jerked her mother back to wakefulness and pain, it seemed to her that
all the loving kindness of the world had gone from her. From then until
her mother was buried she never left her.