Not knowing other girls she had no one to talk to her about clothes.  Before Rose Lashcairn was ill she had taken great pleasure in dressing her little girl; soft things, woven of silk and wool, came from London for her, soft shoes and stockings and frocks of fine texture and beautiful colour that seemed strange and exotic on Lashnagar.  But these were worn out and never replaced—­except for her mother’s funeral she never wore shoes, summer or winter.  Her feet and legs were brown and quite invulnerable to stones or brambles.  Her father did not realize that she needed clothes; her aunt was too much sunk in shadows to notice the child’s appearance.  And, reading her legends and romances, it was natural that Marcella should live them and dress them.  In a press in her mother’s room were clothes brought from the old grey house, the accumulation of days when fabrics were made as heirlooms.  There were plaids and brocades and silks:  there was lace from Valenciennes and linen from Cambrai, yellow with age.  There were muslins that a Lashcairn had brought when he adventured to India with Clive.  Rose often wept over them.  Several times Marcella’s dreams nearly cost her her life, for, living them so utterly, she became detached from the physical world.  One time, when a stormy golden sun went down behind black clouds, shining on an ancient pile of grey stones that stood on a little spit of land near the bar of the river, she was reminded of Tennyson’s “Morte d’Arthur.”  She heard the ripples lapping on the reeds and, with an imaginary Sir Bedivere at her elbow, hurried back to the farm to dress herself as a Scottish edition of King Arthur in kilts that had belonged to her grandfather.  She worshipped the shine of the moon on the great jewel at her breast as she stepped into the little frail boat, very tired after a long day’s wandering on Ben Grief without food.  To a Kelt death is a thing so interpenetrating life that thought of it brought no fear; there was a sort of adventurous anticipation about it.  She cast a stick—­her sword Excalibur—­into midstream and waited for the arm “clad in white samite, mystic, wonderful.”  That it did not appear meant very little to her.  It certainly did not mean that it was not there.  Rather it meant that she could not see it.  So she lay in the little boat and quite certainly she saw the grave Queens at the head, leading her to the Island Valley of Avilion.  Watching the moonlight glittering on her jewel she was hypnotized to sleep, rocked by the soft motion of the little boat.  The current of the stream took her out to sea, the turn of the tide washed her back again, and she wakened at dawn famished with hunger, drenched with the icy water the little boat had shipped.  She was too good a swimmer to drown and, after a valiant struggle, she came to land two miles from home.