and
the old feet of Ben Grief where sheep and cattle fed. The witch-woman,
with her lord and a few servants, fought and battled a way through the
storm of sand and stones to settle where the last of the wind-blown
desert piled on the knees of Ben Grief. The next year Andrew rode away
to the fight at Flodden Field. Unknown to him, the witch-woman who loved
him rode close to his heels.

There his pennant, with its sun in splendour and its flaunting "By
myself I stand," went down. When the hush of death fell on the noise of
battle the witch-woman crawled by night among the dead to find her lord
lying with one arm thrown carelessly over his dead horse's neck. It was
there, companioned only by the dead, that the witch-woman's twins--a boy
and a girl--were born. And it pleased their mother's grim humour to
creep about the battlefield in the darkness until she found banners and
trappings of the Southrons, whom she hated, to act as birth-clothes for
her son and daughter when she carried them back mile after mile to
brooding Lashnagar. It was the boy who was Marcella's ancestor.

Lashnagar was her nursery. On Lashnagar she had seen queer things. One
night, when everyone was asleep and the path of the full moon lay
shining across the sea, she went up on to Lashnagar with the shadows of
the flowering henbane clean-cut and inky about her feet. Half-way up a
great jagged hole lay gashed. Peering into it--she had never seen it
before--she could distinguish the crumbling turret of a church, the roof
of a house and the stiff tops of trees buried partly in a soft sea of
sand in the middle of which was a depression. The heathery ground on
which she kneeled began to crack very gently, and, with beating heart,
she started back, realizing that the hillside was hollow, formed here of
rotted trees thinly overgrown with turf and sand. Next morning she heard
that a shepherd was missing, and then she guessed with horror the
meaning of the chasm and the soft depression.

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