She lived them, she fed on them.  She never read herself into the woman’s part in them.  Only Jeannie Deans really met her requirements as a “part” and she left much to be desired in the way of romance and beauty.  Most often she was young Lochinvar or Rob Roy; sometimes Coeur de Lion led her on full-blooded adventure.  There were quaint old books of Norse and Keltic legend, musty, leather-bound books with wood-cut illustrations and long “s’s” in the printing.  There was Fox’s Book of Martyrs:  there were many tales of the Covenanters, things hard, austere and chill.

One summer a young student came to the farm for the harvest.  He was a peasant lad, a penniless bursary student at Edinburgh University.  In the Long Vacation, he worked at his native farming, reading voraciously all the time and feeding sparingly, saving his wages against the coming bleak winter in his fireless attic in an Edinburgh wynd.  He talked to Marcella, dogmatically, prodigiously, unanswerably.  On her legends and fairy-tales and poetry he poured contempt.  He read the “Riddle of the Universe” and the “Kritic of Pure Reason,” orating them to Marcella as they worked together in the harvest field.  She did not even understand their terminology.  He had a quite unreasoning belief in the stolidly utilitarian of German philosophers and laid siege to Marcella’s mysticism, but after he went back one day she discovered a box of her mother’s poetry books and so Tennyson, Shelley and Keats shone into her life and, reading an ancient copy of “David and Bethsaibe,” she gathered that the Bible Aunt Janet read sourly had quite human possibilities.  This box of books was her first glimpse of a world that was not a long tale of stern fights; it was her first glimpse of something softly sensuous instead of austere and natural and passionate.

Marcella never knew quite how her folks came to live at the farm; it had happened when she was three years old and she took for granted her world of crumbling, decayed splendours.  Hunchback Wullie had told her that the old grey house on Ben Grief used to be her home, and that the lands all about had belonged to her father.  But they were his no longer and she was forbidden to pass the old grey house, or even to speak of it.

Andrew Lashcairn, Aunt Janet, two women servants and a man who never seemed to have any wages for their work lived with Marcella at the farm.  The man and Aunt Janet planted things in the garden, but on the poor land, among the winds they never grew very well.  Oats grew, thin and tough, in the fields, and were ground to make the daily porridge; sometimes one of the skinny fowls that picked and pecked its hungry way through life round about the cattle pen and the back door was killed for a meal; sometimes Marcella ran miles away up Ben Grief when one of the lean pigs screamed its life out in a stream of blood in the yard.  She used to feel sorry for the beasts about the farm; the cows seemed to have such huge,