But his Spartan training had a queer effect upon her.  Always meagrely fed, always knowing the very minimum of comfort, she became oblivious to food or comfort for herself; she became unconscious, independent of her body save as a means of locomotion, but she cared immensely for other people’s.  She shivered to think of Wullie’s brother Tammas and his son Jock out fishing in the night with icy salt water pouring over chafed hands, soaking through their oilskins; she cried after a savagely silent meal of herrings and oatcake when she had not noticed what she was eating, to think of the villagers with nothing but herrings and oatcakes.  She hated to think of things hungry, things in pain.  She even felt a great, inarticulate pity for her father.  For all his striding autocracy and high-handedness there was something naive and childish about him that clutched at her heart.  He was like Ben Grief, alone and bare when the winds tore.

He was thorough, was Andrew Lashcairn.  Finding the young student’s “Riddle of the Universe” in the book-room one day he read it idly.  It started him on a course of philosophy in which he determined to include Marcella.  From Edinburgh came boxes of books—­and a queer assortment of books they were.  Locke and Berkeley, James’ “Natural Religion,” Renan’s “Life of Christ,” a very bad translation of Lucretius; Frazer’s “Golden Bough,” a good deal of Huxley and Darwin, and many of the modern writers.  They were something amazingly new to him, and Marcella used to watch him sitting in the fireless book-room with a candle flickering while the wind soughed round the house and in through every chink in the worn walls.  His fine grey eyes were deep sunken; when he looked up suddenly there was sometimes a little light of madness in them that made her recoil instinctively; his thick hair was greyish, whitening over the temples; his high Keltic cheekbones were gaunter than ever, his forehead and mouth lined with past rages.  He had never held a religion—­the Lashcairn religion had been a jumble of superstition, ancestor-worship and paganism on which a Puritan woman marrying a Lashcairn in the middle seventeenth century had grafted her dour faith.  It had flourished—­something hard and dictatorial about it found good soil on the Lashcairn stock.

So modern Rationalism had a stern fight with Andrew, struggling with the madness of the Kelt, the dourness of the Puritan.  It held him for a year and no more, for a thing unemotional could not grip a thing so excitable.  In that year Marcella was bidden read all the books her father read, and believe them.  When she evaded them she was forced to read them aloud, with a dictionary at her side, and discuss them intelligently with him.  If she answered at random, with her heart and her eyes away at the huts with Wullie, he would throw at her head the nearest thing that came to his hand—­a book, a faggot of wood, a cup of tea—­or order her to bed without any food.  Marcella had to follow him on these