Next day she went back to gaze fascinated at the hole, only to find that already the dry sand had almost filled it, quite covering the cracked place where she had kneeled, the turret and the roof.  She told no one but Hunchback Wullie, an old man who tended the green-wood fires in the huts on the beach, where fish were cured.  Excepting her mother, he was Marcella’s only friend—­he it was who had soaked her mind in the legends of Lashnagar and the hills around; he it was who had taught her the beautiful things learnt by those who grow near to the earth and humble living things.

She ran down the hillside to him that day, her eyes—­the blue-grey eyes of her people—­wide with horror, her long, straight, fair hair, that she wore in two Marguerite plaits, loosened and swinging in the wind.  Hunchback Wullie was in the first hut, threading the herrings through their gills on the long strings that went from side to side high up under the roof.  His ruddy brown beard glistered with the shining scales of the fish, for he had a habit of standing by the hut door looking out to sea and stroking his beard, when another man would have smoked and rested.

“Things never come tae an ending, lassie,” he said, his little red-brown eyes looking out over the grey water.  “Either for good or for ill they’re always gaun on.  They may be quiet like Lashnagar for years, an’ then something crops out—­like yon crumbling last night that killed young Colin.  But it’s not always evil that crops out, mind ye.”

Marcella did not go on Lashnagar again for months.  The next time Wullie was with her, and half-way up the incline they found apple blossom growing about one foot from the ground on a little sapling with a crabbed, thick trunk.

“Why, look at that little apple tree, Wullie—­how brave of it!  I’m going to root it up and take it to my garden.  It can never live here in the sand and the wind.”

Wullie sat down and watched her, smiling a little and stroking his beard as she dug with her hands in the friable soil.  For a long time she dug, but the sapling went deeper and deeper, and at last she sat down hot and tired.

“D’ye ken what ye’re daein’, lassie?” he said, looking at the pink and white bloom reflectively.  “Ye’re diggin’ doon intae death!  Yon flooer’s the reaping of a seedtime many a hundred years gone by.  If ye was tae dig doon an’ doon all the day ye’d find yon apple tree buried deep i’ th’ sand.  The last time it fruited was afore Flodden, when Lashcairns were kings—­”

“What, Wullie, a poor old tree buried all those years, pushing up to light like this?  How could it?” said Marcella, staring at it fascinated.

“I’ve tauld ye afore, Marcella.  There’s no ending tae things!  Sometimes the evil comes cropping oot, like when men get caught an’ buried on Lashnagar.  Sometimes it’s something bonny, like yon flooer.  Yon apple was meant to live an’ bear fruit; the bonny apple’s juist the makeweight.  It’s the seed that matters all the time—­the life that slides along the tree’s life.  Yon tree was buried before its seedtime, and all these years it struggled, up an’ up, till it broke through into the light of the sun.  Like God strugglin’ at the end through a man’s flesh—­”