Lashnagar was her nursery. On Lashnagar she had seen queer things. One
night, when everyone was asleep and the path of the full moon lay
shining across the sea, she went up on to Lashnagar with the shadows of
the flowering henbane clean-cut and inky about her feet. Half-way up a
great jagged hole lay gashed. Peering into it--she had never seen it
before--she could distinguish the crumbling turret of a church, the roof
of a house and the stiff tops of trees buried partly in a soft sea of
sand in the middle of which was a depression. The heathery ground on
which she kneeled began to crack very gently, and, with beating heart,
she started back, realizing that the hillside was hollow, formed here of
rotted trees thinly overgrown with turf and sand. Next morning she heard
that a shepherd was missing, and then she guessed with horror the
meaning of the chasm and the soft depression.

Next day she went back to gaze fascinated at the hole, only to find that
already the dry sand had almost filled it, quite covering the cracked
place where she had kneeled, the turret and the roof. She told no one
but Hunchback Wullie, an old man who tended the green-wood fires in the
huts on the beach, where fish were cured. Excepting her mother, he was
Marcella's only friend--he it was who had soaked her mind in the legends
of Lashnagar and the hills around; he it was who had taught her the
beautiful things learnt by those who grow near to the earth and humble
living things.

She ran down the hillside to him that day, her eyes--the blue-grey eyes
of her people--wide with horror, her long, straight, fair hair, that she
wore in two Marguerite plaits, loosened and swinging in the wind.
Hunchback Wullie was in the first hut, threading the herrings through
their gills on the long strings that went from side to side high up