Suddenly the answer flashed into her head, and sent the blood to her
face as if she had received a stinging slap such as Grandma used to
give: "These things were my mother's!"

How insulting that these traces of the vanished one should have been
hustled into a dingy hole where no self-righteous eyes could be offended
by the sight of them! How frivolous and daintily young they looked, even
in their dusty and (Barrie was furiously sure) undeserved disgrace! This
was the secret of the locked garret!

The girl occasionally had moments of hatred for Grandma: moments when
she thought it would have delighted her to see the grim old Puritan
scoffed at and humiliated, or even tortured. At the picture of torture,
however, Barrie's heart invariably failed, and in fancy she rescued the
victim. But never had she hated Mrs. MacDonald so actively as now.

"My mother!" she said again. "How dared the wicked old creature be such
a brute to her!"

For Barrie was certain that these were relics of her mother's presence
in the house. She knew the history of every other woman who had ever
lived here since the place was built in the seventeenth century by an
Alexander Hillard, an ancestor of Grandma's. A forbidding old prig he
must have been, judging from the portrait over the dining-room
mantelpiece, a worthy forbear of Ann Hillard, who had married Barrie's
grandfather, John MacDonald of Dhrum. Barrie often said to herself that
she did not feel related to Grandma. She wanted to be all MacDonald
and--whatever her mother had been. But it was just that which she did
not know, and not a soul would tell. This was her grievance, the great
and ever-burning grievance as well as mystery of her otherwise
commonplace existence; a conspiracy of silence which kept the secret
under lock and key.

Because of Mrs. MacDonald's "taboo," Barrie's mother had become her
ideal. The girl felt that whatever Grandma disapproved must be beautiful
and lovable; and there had been enough said, as well as enough left
unsaid whenever dumbness could mean condemnation, to prove that the old
woman had detested her daughter-in-law.

All Barrie knew about the immediate past of her family was that her
father's people had once been rich, and as important as their name
implied. They were the MacDonalds of Dhrum, an island not far from Skye,
but they had lost their money; and while old Mrs. MacDonald was still a
young married woman (it seemed incredible that she could have be