‘Desmond! My son!’ ‘Mother!’ was all Desmond could sob in return. ‘Ye know me? Ye know who I am?’ ‘Yes; Peebles has told me,’ returned Desmond. ‘Ye don’t shrink from me? Ye don’t despise the poor woman that loves ye?’ ‘Shrink from you! Despise you!’ cried the boy, straining her to his heart, and speaking between the kisses with which he covered her face, her hands, her dress. ‘I’m like to burst with joy for finding ye! I was alone in the world, with scarce a friend, nameless and hopeless and homeless, and God has sent me _you!_’ He raised her to her feet, and fell on his knees again before her, looking up at her with eyes bright with fast-running tears. ‘Mother! mother! mother!’ It was all that he could say, and there was at once infinite pleasure and poignant grief in his repetition of the word. He fell forward, embracing her knees. ‘God’s good, after all!’ said Moya. ‘Many and many has been the bitter hour all these weary years when I thought He had forgotten me. Oh, my son, my son!’ She lifted him from his kneeling posture, and fed her hungry eyes upon his face. ‘Ye’re my own boy, Desmond. I can see the face that I remember years ago, smilin’ at me from the glass, when I little thought of the bitter trouble in store for me. I can die happy now. There’s nothing more that God can give me, now that I’ve held you in my arms and heard you call me mother.’ ‘Not for many a long year yet, please God,’ sobbed Desmond; ‘not for many a long, happy year that you and I will pass together. I’ve something to live for, now--something to work for. We’ll go away together, back to the place you came from, and forget the past and all its misery.’ ‘_His_ face, too!’ said Moya, who, in her passionately loving scrutiny of Desmond’s features had let his words pass unheeded; ‘his face, as it was when I first knew him!’ ‘You mean my father?’ cried Desmond. ‘I’ve disowned him! I’ve cast him off! I have no father!--nobody in the world but you, mother!’ ‘Hoots, man!’ said Peebles, who stood blinking and looking on like an intelligent raven, ‘are ye going to retreat just when the battle’s in your hand? That’s mighty poor generalship, laddie!’ The events of the last quarter of an hour had quite banished from Desmond’s memory the story the old man had told him as they had walked from the farmer’s cottage towards the mill. At this sudden interruption he stared at Peebles with the empty look of one aroused from a daydream by words which bear no meaning to his mind. ‘All this trouble has turned the poor lad’s brain,’ said Peebles to Moya. ‘Hae ye forgotten,’ he continued to Desmond, ‘all that I told ye not an hour syne?’ The boy gave a sudden cry of recollection, and again threw his arms about his mother’s neck. ‘Come!’ he cried, ‘come to the Castle, and take the place that’s yours by right.’