lasted till the Feast of All Souls without rain or storm. In that hot
summer a witch-woman, very beautiful, had come to Lashnagar to win the
soul of Andrew Lashcairn, winning with his soul his bed and his board. A
wild wooing it was, and a wilder wedding. All the wooing had been done
by the woman--as was the way of the Lashcairn women ever afterwards--in
the dry heat of that unnatural summer when the sap dried in the trees
and the marrow in men's bones, while the heated blood surged through
their veins more quickly than ever before. On the Feast of All Souls,
the wedding day, a copper sun rose in a sky of blood and lead, and all
the folks of Lashnagar drank deeply to drive away impending horror. That
night, after they slept, while Andrew Lashcairn lay awake in the
witch-woman's arms, a great wind came in from the sea, sweeping before
it the salt sand of the dunes, covering the village and the castle and
the old feet of Ben Grief where sheep and cattle fed. The witch-woman,
with her lord and a few servants, fought and battled a way through the
storm of sand and stones to settle where the last of the wind-blown
desert piled on the knees of Ben Grief. The next year Andrew rode away
to the fight at Flodden Field. Unknown to him, the witch-woman who loved
him rode close to his heels.

There his pennant, with its sun in splendour and its flaunting "By
myself I stand," went down. When the hush of death fell on the noise of
battle the witch-woman crawled by night among the dead to find her lord
lying with one arm thrown carelessly over his dead horse's neck. It was
there, companioned only by the dead, that the witch-woman's twins--a boy
and a girl--were born. And it pleased their mother's grim humour to
creep about the battlefield in the darkness until she found banners and
trappings of the Southrons, whom she hated, to act as birth-clothes for
her son and daughter when she carried them back mile after mile to
brooding Lashnagar. It was the boy who was Marcella's ancestor.