He seemed often to resent his illness bitterly; he had never known anything but an almost savage strength.  Now he lay watching his illness with a curious mixture of fierce resentment and proprietorial pride.  He spent a good deal of his time trying to think of ways in which he could circumvent the choking sensation that often came to him.  Marcella brought some comfort by placing the kitchen ironing board across the bed, resting on the backs of two chairs so that he could lean forward on it.  Sometimes he slept so, his grey head jerking forward and backward in his weariness.

One night, when he could not sleep, he got out of bed and, leaning on Marcella’s shoulders, began to walk about.  The moon was rising desolately over Lashnagar, and he stood for a long time in the window looking at the dead waste of it all.  Suddenly he shivered.

“Father, ye’re cold,” said Marcella quickly.  “Let me put on your socks.  It’s a shame of me to let you stand barefoot so long.”

He sat down on the deep window-seat, and the moonlight streamed in upon his feet as she knelt beside him.

“Why, you are getting fat, father,” she said.  “I can hardly get your socks on!  And I thought your face looked thinner to-day.  What a good thing—­if you get fat.”

“Fat, Marcella?” he said in a strange, faint voice.  “That’s what the doctor’s been expecting.  It’s the last lap!”

“What do you mean, father?  Isn’t it better for you to be getting fat now?”

He smiled a little and, bending down, pressed his fingers on the swollen ankle.  The indentations stayed there.  She thought of the soft depression on Lashnagar where the young shepherd had gone down.

“We’ll just walk about a bit, Marcella,” he said, his hand pressing heavily on her shoulder.  “I thought my legs felt very tired and heavy.  This is the last lap of the race.  When my hands get fat like that my heart will be drowned, Marcella.”

“Father, what do you mean?” she cried frantically, but he told her nothing.  There were no medical books in the house which she could read.  She had to be content, as Wullie had said, to go on to the end knowing nothing, while things trod along her life.

“It’s a damned sort of death, Marcella, for a Lashcairn.  Lying in bed—­getting stiffer and heavier—­and in the end drowned.  We like to go out fighting, Marcella, killing and being killed.  Did I ever tell you of Tammas Lashcairn and how he tore a wolf to pieces in the old grey house on Ben Grief?”

He talked quickly and strangely, disjointed talk out of which she wove wild tales of the deaths of her people in the past.

After he had got back into bed and she stooped over him, trying to chafe warmth into his cold feet, he looked at her more kindly than he had ever looked before.

“All my life I have cursed you because you were a girl.  I cursed your mother because she gave me no son.  And now I thank God that you are not a man, to carry on the old name.”