In Marcella’s lifetime men had been lost on Lashnagar, and sheep and dogs, adventuring too far, had never come back.  Legend had it that hundreds of years ago Lashnagar had been a quiet little village nestling round Castle Lashcairn, the home of Marcella’s folks.  That was in the year before Flodden Field, a hot, dry time that began with Lady Day and lasted till the Feast of All Souls without rain or storm.  In that hot summer a witch-woman, very beautiful, had come to Lashnagar to win the soul of Andrew Lashcairn, winning with his soul his bed and his board.  A wild wooing it was, and a wilder wedding.  All the wooing had been done by the woman—­as was the way of the Lashcairn women ever afterwards—­in the dry heat of that unnatural summer when the sap dried in the trees and the marrow in men’s bones, while the heated blood surged through their veins more quickly than ever before.  On the Feast of All Souls, the wedding day, a copper sun rose in a sky of blood and lead, and all the folks of Lashnagar drank deeply to drive away impending horror.  That night, after they slept, while Andrew Lashcairn lay awake in the witch-woman’s arms, a great wind came in from the sea, sweeping before it the salt sand of the dunes, covering the village and the castle and the old feet of Ben Grief where sheep and cattle fed.  The witch-woman, with her lord and a few servants, fought and battled a way through the storm of sand and stones to settle where the last of the wind-blown desert piled on the knees of Ben Grief.  The next year Andrew rode away to the fight at Flodden Field.  Unknown to him, the witch-woman who loved him rode close to his heels.

There his pennant, with its sun in splendour and its flaunting “By myself I stand,” went down.  When the hush of death fell on the noise of battle the witch-woman crawled by night among the dead to find her lord lying with one arm thrown carelessly over his dead horse’s neck.  It was there, companioned only by the dead, that the witch-woman’s twins—­a boy and a girl—­were born.  And it pleased their mother’s grim humour to creep about the battlefield in the darkness until she found banners and trappings of the Southrons, whom she hated, to act as birth-clothes for her son and daughter when she carried them back mile after mile to brooding Lashnagar.  It was the boy who was Marcella’s ancestor.

Lashnagar was her nursery.  On Lashnagar she had seen queer things.  One night, when everyone was asleep and the path of the full moon lay shining across the sea, she went up on to Lashnagar with the shadows of the flowering henbane clean-cut and inky about her feet.  Half-way up a great jagged hole lay gashed.  Peering into it—­she had never seen it before—­she could distinguish the crumbling turret of a church, the roof of a house and the stiff tops of trees buried partly in a soft sea of sand in the middle of which was a depression.  The heathery ground on which she kneeled began to crack very gently, and, with beating heart, she started back, realizing that the hillside was hollow, formed here of rotted trees thinly overgrown with turf and sand.  Next morning she heard that a shepherd was missing, and then she guessed with horror the meaning of the chasm and the soft depression.