rigour of Thy law--"

There was no alleviation, and Marcella, kneeling there, wished that she
and her father could die together. The horror of helplessness was
searing her soul.

Next day came agonizing pain which made every movement a death. But the
Edinburgh doctor who came brought relief for the pain, and, talking with
Dr. Angus, the Carlossie doctor, mentioned, among other technicalities,
the name of a drug--"digitalis." That afternoon Marcella went back in
the doctor's trap to get the new medicine, and it gave relief. Whenever,
after that, the choking came back, Andrew would cry out for digitalis,
which seemed to him the elixir of life. Sometimes he would pray for
courage; sometimes, cracking suddenly, he would pray for digitalis and
send Marcella often at midnight with a pleading note to the doctor to
give him the drug and a little soothing for his heart that was running
away with him.

Now that he could not move about he still thought of the souls of the
people in the village, and sent a message to them, pleading with them to
come and see him. And they, remembering him as the laird, with a sort of
feudal obedience, came and stood about his bed, to be stormed at or
prayed with according to Andrew's mood. But always after one of these
missionary efforts he would suffer agonies of suffocation when he had
forgotten, for a while, that his heart was a bubble of glass.

It was an unreal world, this shadowed world of the old farm. It centred
round Andrew Lashcairn's bed--he was its sun, its king, its autocrat
still. But things material had slipped from him--or rather, material
interests were all centralized in his tortured body. At first during his
illness he had worried about the farm, sending messages to Duncan much
more than he had done during the days when he was shut behind the green
baize door. But now all the farm had slipped from him. He was alone with
his body and his soul and God. Most often his soul cried out. Sometimes
his body broke through and showed its pains and the strength of old
desires.

As he grew weaker he tried to grasp out at strength. Aunt Janet, who had
"ruled herself" to nervelessness, had nothing of the mother, the nurse
in her make-up; there was no tenderness in what she did for him. It was
not that she had any spirit of getting her own back on Andrew for his
tyranny, his impoverishment, his ill-usage of her in the past. She would
have given him her last crumb of food if she had thought