It was a wild, bizarre picture; the fire, fanned by the fierce winds that swept down the open chimney, kept sending out puffs of smoke that went like grey wraiths about the room; the top of the table rutted by hundreds of years’ fierce feeding; the shattered crockery and forlorn-looking mess of food on the floor.  Aunt Janet and Marcella shrunk away—­her father never got one of his rages but the girl felt old agony in her broken arm—­but the little white-faced cousin stood in front of Andrew’s gaunt frame, which seemed twice his size.

“What’s the matter, Cousin Andrew?” he asked mildly.  Then, turning to the others, he said gently:  “Go away for a little while.  I’ll have a talk with Andrew about little Rose.”

They went away with Andrew’s curses following them along the windy passage.  Marcella waited in sympathy with the little man’s arms, but after a while a murmur of normal conversation came from the room and went on until two o’clock in the morning.  At last the little old cousin came to where Marcella and Aunt Janet shivered in the kitchen, and said simply: 

“Andrew has cast his burden on the Lord, and now he can go on his way singing.”

Marcella began to cry from sheer nervousness.  She had not the faintest idea what the cousin meant, but she was to know it as time went by.  For Andrew got religion as he got everything else—­very thoroughly—­and, just as he had superimposed Rationalism on his house and bent it before his whisky furies, now he tried to religionize it.

After two days the cousin went away and never came again.  Almost it seemed as though he had never been, for he wrote not at all, simply going his serene, white-faced way through their lives for two days and two nights and dropping out of them.  Marcella, telling Wullie about it, received his explanation.

“It’s what I tauld ye afore, lassie.  We’re not things or people, really.  We’re juist paths.”

“Was it God who came along that night?” asked Marcella doubtfully.  Wullie thought it was.  But she found her father’s religion even more difficult than any of his other obsessions.  It made him eager and pathetic.  He had never tried to make drunkards of people; Marcella he had impatiently tried to make a rationalist; but now he spent all his time trying to convert them.  His household was veneered with evangelism.  The kindly desire to save brands from the burning sent him to the village praying and quoting the Word to those who once thought him a king, later a terror, and now could not understand him.  Men coming from the fields and the boats were asked questions about their peace with God, and in the little chapel where once the Covenanters had met, Andrew Lashcairn’s voice was raised in prayers and exhortations so long and so burning that he often emptied the place even of zealots before he had tired himself and God.