“But on the roof!” he protested.  “Whatever next?”

“Oh, come and see.  You’ll love it,” she urged and, though he said it was “a beastly fag,” she got him at last into his dressing-gown and slippers and sitting beside her on the coping.

She was happier than she had been for months; she felt that there was enough breath up here for her, and not even his laughing at her for being “such a kid” could damp her enjoyment.  Presently a new idea occurred to her.

“Let’s sleep up here!” she cried, and once again over-ruled his objections, and dragged up the mattress and blankets.

The shadows of the chimneys were long across the roofs as she laid the mattress down by the coping.  The day had been hot with the clear, bright heat of early summer.  They sat on the mattress, smoking—­an accomplishment Marcella had learnt from him and practised rather tentatively.  She talked to him of Lashnagar, pouring into his ears legend after legend of her people, until she came to the tale of the spaewife and the coming of the ruin upon Lashnagar.

“Do you mean to have the cheek to say this is an ancestor of yours?” he asked as, with glowing eyes and quickened breaths, she told him of the twins born on Flodden Field and wrapt in their foemen’s trappings.  Had he been less self-centred he could not have tried to hurt her by making fun of her legends.

“Yes.  She is my great, great, goodness knows how great grandmother.  I’m rather proud of her, but she takes some living up to.  I often feel I disappoint her.  But if ever I feel flabby or lazy or tired of hard things I switch my mind on to her.  Fancy her, sick and weak, tramping after her man to the battle, and then leaving him dead as she took his heirs and his shattered pennant back to the ruins of his home.  I feel ashamed of myself for ever daring to think I’m ill-used when I think of my spaewife grandmother!  We’re not brave and hard like that now—­But I’d rather like to get her here to settle you and people who talk about ‘limiting’ women.  She wasn’t much of a passenger.”

“Oh, that witch story comes in lots of mythologies, and old family histories!” he said, teasingly.  “I don’t suppose she ever existed at all, really, or if she did it was because she’d been tarred and feathered and took refuge at that out of the world show because she was afraid of being burnt.”

“Afraid!” she cried, and began to tingle all over just as she had tingled when Mactavish played the pipes at her father’s funeral.  Just for an instant she wanted to push Louis over the roof, hear him smash far below on the street for daring to say the spaewife was afraid.  Then, just as swiftly, she remembered that he was weak and must not be annoyed because he could not stand it.  It came to her in a flash how impossible it was for him, with no pride but self-love, no courage but Dutch courage, to understand fearlessness and endurance.  Her tingling smart of madness and anger passed, leaving her penitent and pitying.  She put her arm round his neck and kissed him behind his ear.  He, not knowing the swift processes of her thought, imagined that he had “knocked a bit of the silliness out of her” effectively.