"'Twas you that made me do it," said she, sullenly.
"Do what? What did ye do?"
"I buried my father."
"Did ye set Saul to do it?"
"No; what should I have to do asking a man like Saul?"
"Lassie, lassie! it's no for me to condemn ye, nor maybe for the dead either, for he was whiles a hard father to you, but I wonder your own woman's heart didn't misgive ye."
Perhaps, for all he knew, it had misgiven her often, but she did not say so now.
"In the clearin's all round Turrifs they buried on their own lands," she said, still sullen.
"Ye buried him on his own land!" he exclaimed, the wonder of it growing upon him. "When? Where? Out with it! Make a clean breast of it."
"I buried him that night. The coffin slipped easy enough out of the window and on the dry leaves when I dragged it. I laid him between the rocks at the side, just under where the bank was going to fall, and then I went up and pushed the bank down upon him." She looked up and cried defiantly: "Father'd as soon lie there as in a cemetery!" Although it was as if she was crushing beneath her heel that worship of conventionality which had made Bates try to send the body so far to a better grave, there was still in her last words a tone of pathos which surprised even herself. Something in the softening influences which had been about her since that crisis of her young life made her feel more ruth at the recital of the deed than she had felt at its doing. "I made a bed of moss and leaves," she said, "and I shut up the ledge he lay in with bits of rock, so that naught could touch him."