'Then I may tell you. I would have written weeks ago, but I was afraid to add disappointment to your other misfortunes, so I asked you to come here, and when you had come I found I could not speak to you about it. A man's grief seems such a sacred thing. But now. There was a friend of mine actually saw that ship caught up by the storm, and carried in shore and dashed against the rocks. They are rocks completely surrounded by water and surf at a high tide, and with an easterly wind. He could not possibly get near, and there was no human dwelling within sight, or for miles around, so he could give no help. But the following morning he was riding along the shore very early--earlier than the fisher folk, who, of course, came prowling along later in search of plunder and sea wreck. He came on the bodies of several of the drowned, and at last on a lady with her Indian maid. The lady had a piece of that chain twisted in her fingers, and not far off he came on a little baby so carefully tied up, and still alive. He had his own duties for the day, and he could be of no service to the dead, who, he knew besides, would be cared for by the proper authorities in a very little while, so he left them where they lay. But the baby was alive, and while he was examining it looked up in his face with such a friendly trustful look that he could not help taking it up and vowing to be a father to it till its own should be found.' 'And so he has been keeping my child hidden away through all these months of desolation!' 'My dear fellow, he had' no intention of that whatever. He wrote to the Edinburgh newspapers at once; but you must remember that at the time of the shipwreck your father was not aware that he had a grandchild at all, nor for weeks after. If Roderick Brown had left the child beside its mother to be found by the coastguards or the fishermen, it would have been handed over to the mercy of parish charity, which is perhaps not over tender. And who can tell if it would have survived till you went to claim it? The chain, too, is heavy and valuable, and who knows but that might have been temptation enough to keep the child out of your sight for ever?' 'Let us go to the child at once, then, Kenneth! and not to the shore with its miserable memories of wrecks and corpses.' So the horse was put about, and they struck across the moor to Glen Effick. CHAPTER XXXVI. _AUGUSTUS WALLOWBY_. Eppie Ness was at her door when Kenneth and his friend drew up before it. She had a foreboding, when she saw two of them, that the other must be the father of her baby, and that he was come to take it away; and tears rose plentifully to her eyes and trickled over her withered cheeks as she led them into her house.