They went away with Andrew's curses following them along the windy
passage. Marcella waited in sympathy with the little man's arms, but
after a while a murmur of normal conversation came from the room and
went on until two o'clock in the morning. At last the little old cousin
came to where Marcella and Aunt Janet shivered in the kitchen, and said
simply:

"Andrew has cast his burden on the Lord, and now he can go on his way
singing."

Marcella began to cry from sheer nervousness. She had not the faintest
idea what the cousin meant, but she was to know it as time went by. For
Andrew got religion as he got everything else--very thoroughly--and,
just as he had superimposed Rationalism on his house and bent it before
his whisky furies, now he tried to religionize it.

After two days the cousin went away and never came again. Almost it
seemed as though he had never been, for he wrote not at all, simply
going his serene, white-faced way through their lives for two days and
two nights and dropping out of them. Marcella, telling Wullie about it,
received his explanation.

"It's what I tauld ye afore, lassie. We're not things or people, really.
We're juist paths."

"Was it God who came along that night?" asked Marcella doubtfully.
Wullie thought it was. But she found her father's religion even more
difficult than any of his other obsessions. It made him eager and
pathetic. He had never tried to make drunkards of people; Marcella he
had impatiently tried to make a rationalist; but now he spent all his
time trying to convert them. His household was veneered with evangelism.
The kindly desire to save brands from the burning sent him to the
village praying and quoting the Word to those who once thought him a
king, later a terror, and now could not understand him. Men coming from
the fields and the boats were asked questions about their peace with
God, and in the little chapel where once the Covenanters had met, Andrew
Lashcairn's voice was raised in prayers and exhortations so long and so
burning that he often emptied the place even of zealots before he had
tired himself and God.

All the time Marcella ached with pity for him now that she feared him no
longer. He seemed so naive, so wistful to her, this strange father whom
she could never understand, but who seemed like a child very keen on a
game of make-believe. Things went from bad to worse, but they sat down
to their meal of oatcake and milk uncomplaining, after a lon