Her romance was never killed by misadventures.  The very next day she climbed Ben Grief and lighted a ring of fire round his wrinkled brow by carrying up loads of dried heather and grass through which she fought her way to the rescue of a dream Brunnhilde, sleeping within the fire.  She reached home that night with scorched clothes and hair, and smoke-smarting eyes.  But such mishaps were only part of the adventure, as inevitable as storms in winter and wounds in battle.  These dreams were in the days before her father’s Rationalism kept her chained indoors:  his evangelism sowed seeds that took root and flowered into a desire that she might be a wild-eyed, flame-tongued John the Baptist, making straight the way of the Lord.  When this dream came to her it transmuted all the other dreams; from so deep down inside her that it seemed a voice of someone autocratic standing beside her came the conviction that to be a John the Baptist meant to be a martyr and an anchorite.  For days after her father’s death she wandered on the hills, preaching deliverance to the screaming gulls, who would not be quiet like St. Francis’ birds when he preached.  Many days she took food with her and deliberately refused to eat it, walking miles after she was worn out in a considered attempt at the subjection of the flesh, after the manner of saints of old.  Sometimes she preached peace to the desolate ghosts on Lashnagar, but they did not seem to listen.

Then, just after this, several things happened to bring her thoughts away from dreams to a realization of herself as a concrete, circumscribed being.  Wullie had warned her of this.

“Ye’re up in the clouds, now, Marcella, like a wraith.  Some day ye’ll come down to airth.  And it’ll be with sic’ a bang that ye’ll find ye’re very solid.”  She had not understood him.

For six weeks after her father’s funeral she had almost maddening neuralgia.  One day, meeting Dr. Angus in the village she stopped to speak to him.  Indeed, it was impossible to pass him, for he had bought Rose Lashcairn’s little mare who, even after six years, remembered Marcella and stood with eager, soft eyes while the girl stroked her velvet nose and satin sides.  This was the first time the doctor had seen Marcella since the funeral and she had been weighing on his mind:  he guessed at more than the Lashcairns would ever have told him of their circumstances; he had sent in no bill for Andrew’s illness and, out of his own pocket, had paid the Edinburgh specialist.  Marcella knew nothing of this—­if she thought of it at all, she would have thought that the doctor just happened, as everything else in her life, by chance.

“Marcella, you’re not looking the thing,” he said.  “Hop up beside me.  I’ve not seen you for ages.  Let us have a talk.  I’ve to drive along to Pitleathy and I’ll drop you here on my way back.”

She sprang in beside him and told him about the neuralgia.

“I had it first when I used to sit up with father.  Now I have it all the time—­and dreadful headaches.  I never knew what aches meant before.  I’m afraid when Jean used to say she had the headache I wasn’t so kind to her as I expect her to be to me.”