With Tom she of course had no pursuits in common; he treated her with harshness, and as much as possible she avoided him.  Even Mrs. Kinlay seemed to regard her with very scant affection, and as the girl grew in years her position at the farm became that of a servant rather than of a daughter.  As for Carver Kinlay himself, he seldom spoke a gentle word to body or beast, and Thora had no exception from his severity.  His continued ill treatment of her was, however, the more difficult to endure, since from simple abuse it often extended to actual brutality.  She could never understand why her father and mother were so unkind to her, and to hear a few words of sympathy was always comforting.

One day late in the autumn I was tending our sheep on the banks above the cliffs of Gaulton, lying on the soft green turf with my hands under my chin, looking dreamily across the sea towards the blue outline of hills on the Scotch coast.  I had just finished reading the last pages of Robinson Crusoe, and the book had fallen from my hand.  Like my sheep, I was languid with the heat of the noonday sun, and the sight of the ships and the whirling seagulls was refreshing to me.  The sound of the waves down below on the rocks was soothing.

Presently something dropped lightly on the grass before my eyes.  It was a sprig of sweetbrier.  I turned lazily and saw Thora standing by my side.  Without speaking a word she sat down, and together we looked out upon the blue sea.

We remained silent for several moments without greeting each other.  But at last I said: 

“I was thinking maybe you’d be coming across to see me, Thora, one o’ these bonnie days, now that we never meet at the school.  It was good o’ ye to come.”

She turned to me with a smile, but I saw that her eyes were moistened with tears.

“What has gone wrong, Thora?” I continued.  “Has Carver been ill using you again?”

“Yes, he’s aye using me ill,” she said, sobbing and wiping her eyes.  “I was in the garden just now, nipping some dead leaves from the briar bush, when he came in at the gate.  He never likes to see me among my flowers, and when he found me there he got into a passion, and walked over the beds, and kicked the plants about with his sea boots.  Then he ordered me away into the house, and said that if I wanted work to do, I might go and clean out the stable.  I told him that was a man’s work, not a lassie’s; and at that he took up a stick, and struck me with it across the back.”

And here she sobbed again.

I did not speak, but I felt my blood run hot in indignation against Carver Kinlay.  I would have liked to thrash him.

“If I were a lad like you, Halcro,” she continued, “it’s not long I would bide at Crua Breck.  I would run away to sea.  But what can a helpless lassie do?  Nobody has a good word to say for my father since the Curlew was lost, and—­I canna help it—­I hae just as great an ill will at him as anybody else has.”