“You think of going back to the old place,” she said, because he could not speak.

“Aye.”

“Miss Bates is keeping pretty well?”—­this in conventional tone that was oddly mortised into the passionate working of her mind.

“Oh, aye.”

“Why wouldn’t you sell it and live in a town?”

“It’s the only air there I can be breathing,” said he; the confession was wrung from him by his present struggle for breath.  “I’m not fit for a town.”

“I hear them saying down at the hotel that you’re awfully ill.”

“It’s not mortal, the doctor says.”

“You’ll need someone to take care of you, Mr. Bates.”

“Oh, I’ll get that.”

He spoke as if setting aside the subject of his welfare with impatience, and she let it drop; but because he was yet too breathless to speak his mind, she began again: 

“I don’t mind if you don’t sell, for I don’t want to get any money.”

“Oh, but ye can sell when I’m gone; it’ll be worth more then than now.  I’m just keeping a place I can breathe in, ye understand, as long as I go on breathing.”

She pulled the leaves in her hand, tearing them lengthwise and crosswise.

“What I want—­to ask of ye now is—­what I want to ask ye first is a solemn question.  Do ye know where your father’s corpse—­is laid?”

“Yes, I know,” she said.  “He didn’t care anything about cemeteries, father didn’t.”

He looked at her keenly, and there was a certain stern setting of his strong lower jaw.  His words were quick:  “Tell on.”

“’Twas you that made me do it,” said she, sullenly.

“Do what?  What did ye do?”

“I buried my father.”

“Did ye set Saul to do it?”

“No; what should I have to do asking a man like Saul?”

“Lassie, lassie! it’s no for me to condemn ye, nor maybe for the dead either, for he was whiles a hard father to you, but I wonder your own woman’s heart didn’t misgive ye.”

Perhaps, for all he knew, it had misgiven her often, but she did not say so now.

“In the clearin’s all round Turrifs they buried on their own lands,” she said, still sullen.

“Ye buried him on his own land!” he exclaimed, the wonder of it growing upon him.  “When?  Where?  Out with it!  Make a clean breast of it.”

“I buried him that night.  The coffin slipped easy enough out of the window and on the dry leaves when I dragged it.  I laid him between the rocks at the side, just under where the bank was going to fall, and then I went up and pushed the bank down upon him.”  She looked up and cried defiantly:  “Father’d as soon lie there as in a cemetery!” Although it was as if she was crushing beneath her heel that worship of conventionality which had made Bates try to send the body so far to a better grave, there was still in her last words a tone of pathos which surprised even herself.  Something in the softening influences which had been about her since that crisis of her young life made her feel more ruth at the recital of the deed than she had felt at its doing.  “I made a bed of moss and leaves,” she said, “and I shut up the ledge he lay in with bits of rock, so that naught could touch him.”