excursions into philosophic doubt, sacrificing her pet calf of legend and poetry every day in the temple of Rimmon, handcuffed to him as she did it.  But Andrew Lashcairn did everything with such thoroughness that he seemed to use up a certain set of cells in his brain exhaustively, and thus procure revulsion.  A man who can drink half a gallon of whisky a day for years consistently, and stop without a moment’s notice, can do most things.  Andrew took Rationalism as he took whisky; he forced it upon his household.

In all this time her chief joy was to be found in writing long letters to her dead mother, whom she imagined to be living somewhere between the sunshine and the rain, an immanent presence.  These letters she burnt usually, though sometimes she made little boats of them and floated them out to sea, and sometimes she pushed them into the shifting sands through fissures on Lashnagar.  They comforted her strangely; they were adoration and love crystallized.  Her only friendliness came from Hunchback Wullie, when she could escape from the book-room and run down to his hut.

It was a hard winter, this winter of philosophic doubt for souls and bodies both.  The wild gales kept the fishing-boats at home; the wild weather had played havoc with the harvests, and often Marcella knew that Wullie was hungry, though he never told her so.  Whenever she went to the hut she would manage to be absent from a meal beforehand, and going to Jean, would ask for her ration of whatever was going.  Down in the hut she and Wullie would sit round the fire of driftwood, reaching down dried herrings from the roof and toasting them on spits of wood for their feast.  And they would talk while the sea crept up and down outside whispering, or dashed almost at the door shrieking.

One night as they sat toasting their fish and watching the salt driftwood splutter and crackle with blue flames, Marcella asked Wullie what he thought of philosophic doubt.

“I’ve been reading a book to father to-day, Wullie, that says we are all unreal—­that we are not here really, but only a dream.”

Wullie sat back a little, turned the fish on his spit without speaking, and then said: 

“Well, maybe we are.  Maybe all life’s a dream.  But all the same it is a dream dreamed by God.”

“I think that’s what the book says, but they use such hard words.”

“I wouldna fash, lassie.  There’s not much we do understand, any of us.  That’s where I think books fall short—­they explain things just as far as the writer understands.  And whiles he doesna understand very far, but he’s got a trick of putting things nicely.  Most things you know without understanding:  you do them blindly and someday you see they’ve been right.  That’s what I mean about God making us a pathway.  I feel that He has been walking along my life; I couldna prove it to ye, Marcella.  But one day He’ll suddenly turn round when He gets to the end of me and smile and thank me for carrying Him along a bit.”