"Then what can anyone do?" she said, looking at the pitiful little
tree, stripped now of its leaves in the autumn chill.

"I tauld ye--juist not hinder. An' lie as quiet as ye can because ye're
a path--"

It was in this way that Marcella got her education. Most of the time
Wullie talked above her head save when he told her of the habits of
animals and plants, of the winds and the seasons. Her mother, before she
was too ill, had taught her to read and that was all. Even her mother,
drawn in upon herself with pain, talked above her head most of the time,
too. The girl turned herself loose in the big room at the farm where
books were stored and there she spent days on end when the weather was
too wild to be braved. It was a queer collection of books. All Scott's
novels were there; she found in them an enchanted land. She lived them,
she fed on them. She never read herself into the woman's part in them.
Only Jeannie Deans really met her requirements as a "part" and she left
much to be desired in the way of romance and beauty. Most often she was
young Lochinvar or Rob Roy; sometimes Coeur de Lion led her on
full-blooded adventure. There were quaint old books of Norse and Keltic
legend, musty, leather-bound books with wood-cut illustrations and long
"s's" in the printing. There was Fox's Book of Martyrs: there were many
tales of the Covenanters, things hard, austere and chill.

One summer a young student came to the farm for the harvest. He was a
peasant lad, a penniless bursary student at Edinburgh University. In the
Long Vacation, he worked at his native farming, reading voraciously all
the time and feeding sparingly, saving his wages against the coming
bleak winter in his fireless attic in an Edinburgh wynd. He talked to
Marcella, dogmatically, prodigiously, unanswerably. On her legends and