“Yes,” she said, “that house was. When my father first went there, there was only a one-roomed place, and he had to pick up the stones off the fields before he could plant. He said my mother put her life into that bit of land. That was why she died so young. I’ve heard him say he could never see a hayrick or a sheaf of ours without thinking her very heart was inside it. In time he built two rooms more, putting stone upon stone himself, and Niel helping him. And when, the summer after Niel was dead, the factor’s letter came, saying the rent was to be raised, I thought my father was struck for a dead man. I mind I lay waking through the night. I slept in the old part of the house that had been there from the beginning, and just when the light was peeping in, I heard a strange sound, like a spade howking in hard earth. I lay and listened, and I thought it was like the digging of a grave, and that it was a sign sent that my father’s time had come. I kept still, for it’s ill to pry where a sign is set. Then I heard something like a very heavy sigh and a cough. I thought ‘that’s human,’ and I ventured to peep. There was my old father himself, howking down the stones that he’d built up, one by one! And all that day he did it, and by nightfall no human creature could find a place there to lay its head. And it was the room where my mother had died, and where Niel had sat in the chimney corner. My father never said one word,” she concluded, “but I knew what was in his heart. And next day he took the rubble, and threw it over the fields. ‘And now,’ said he, ‘let the laird come and take his own again.’” A fierce vindictive exultation thrilled through her wailing Celtic voice. “But he that quarrels with the gentry is a miserable man,” she went on. “Trouble came of it. The ford is as deep as the pool. Yet we got another cot and croft close by, on another laird’s land. It was but a one-roomed place with a stony field. But my father did nothing to it this time. Weak is the grasp of the downcast! He was an old man, and I think he left the soul of his soul in the other place where his children had been born and his wife had died. My father never spoke out about the hardship he’d had, but he went about, muttering, and though he had been a godly man, it was the sound o’ curses that I heard. One was, ‘May he die in the poors’ house.’ I knew he meant the laird. And just one week after father himself was taken away, his prayer came true,” she added in a strange, hissing tone, which sent a shiver over her listeners. They all bent forward, eagerly attentive. A strange light in her eyes seemed to draw their souls towards hers.