“Why, father?” she asked, her eyes frightened and puzzled.

“The Lord deals righteously.  I shall sleep now,” was all he said.

It was Wullie who told her what her father had meant.  They were up on Ben Grief watching the swollen streams overflowing with melted snow and storm-water.  Marcella looked wan and tired; her eyes were ringed with black shadows.  As usual she was hungry, but Wullie had left potatoes buried under the green-wood fire, and they would feast when they got back.

“Why is it father is glad I’m not a boy?” she asked him.

It was a long time before he told her.

“The Lashcairns are a wild lot, lassie—­especially the men folk.  They kill and they rule others and they drink.  It’s drink that’s ruined them, because drink is the only thing they canna rule.  That’s the men folk I’m talking of.  Your great-grandfather lost all his lands that lie about Carlossie.  The old grey house and the fields all about Ben Grief and Lashnagar were lost by your father.  All he’s got now is Lashnagar and the farm-house.  And Lashnagar canna be sold because it hasna any value.  Else he’d have sold it, to put it in his bar’l.”

She said nothing.  Her tired eyes looked out over the farm and the desolate hill, her hair, streaming in the wind, suddenly wrapped her face, blinding her.  As she struggled with it, light came, and she turned to Wullie.

“It was the barrel, then, that made father ill?”

“It was so.”

“And grandfather, and his father—­did they get ill, too, through the barrel?”

He shook his head, and she snatched at his arm roughly.

“Wullie, ye’re to tell me.  I’m telling ye ye’re to tell me, Wullie.  I never heard of them.  How did they die?  I shall ask father if you don’t tell me.”

“Your great-grandfather killed his son in a quarrel, when your father was a bit laddie of four.  The next day he was found dead beside his bar’l in the cellar.”

The storm-water went swirling down by their feet, brown and frothing.  It went down and down as though Ben Grief were crying hopelessly for this wild people he had cradled.

“I see, now, why he’s glad I’m not a boy.  Wullie—­do all the Lashcairns die—­like that?” and she pictured again her father waiting, as he put it, to be drowned in his bed while a procession of killed and killing ancestors seemed to glide before her eyes over the rushing water.

“The men folk, yes.  They canna rule themselves.”

“And the women?” she said sharply, realizing that she and Aunt Janet were all that were left.

“They keep away from the bar’l.”

“Yes, I couldn’t imagine Aunt Janet doing that,” she said, smiling faintly.  “Or me.”

“Some of the women rule themselves,” he said tentatively.  “There was the witch-woman first—­and later there was the Puritan woman.  They seem to mother your women between them.  There’s never any telling which it’ll be.”