CHAPTER II


After his wife's death Andrew Lashcairn was harder, colder. Fits of
glowering depression took the place of rage, and he never went behind
the green baize door, though the barrel stayed there. He seemed to have
conceived the idea of making Marcella strong; perhaps he was afraid that
she would be frail as her mother had been; perhaps he tried to persuade
himself that her mother's illness and death were constitutional frailty
rather than traumatic, and in pursuance of this self-deception he tried
to suggest that Marcella had inherited her delicacy and must be
hardened. Divorced from his den and his barrel by his own will-power he
had to find something to do. And he undertook Marcella as an interest in
life.

Things were going a little better at the farm because of Rose
Lashcairn's money: more cows came, and sacks of meal and corn
replenished the empty coffers in the granary. Marcella still divided
her time when she could between the book-room, Lashnagar and Wullie's
smoking-hut; but every morning Andrew Lashcairn tore her out of bed at
five o'clock and went with her through snows and frosts, and, later,
through the fresh spring mornings to teach her to swim in the wild
breakers of the North Sea. Many a girl would have died; Marcella proved
herself more a child of the Lashcairns than of her little English mother
by living and thriving on it. Her father sent her to work in the fields
with the men, but forbade her to speak to any of the village women who
worked there, telling her to remember that her folks were kings when
theirs were slaves. One night, when the snow drifted in from Lashnagar
on to her bed, she closed her window, and he, with a half return of the