"Hear till him again, my leddy," exclaimed Elsie; "the bairn can speak French--that cowes a'!" "He cries for his father--poor child--poor child!" said Lady Rohallion, whose eyes filled with tears. "Father--yes, madame; my father--where is he?" said the boy, opening his fine large eyes wider with an expression of anxiety and fear, and speaking in a lisping but strongly foreign accent; "take me to him--take me to him, madame, if you please." "The bairn speaks English well enough," said the dominie; "he'll hae had a French tutor, or some sic haverel, to teach him to play the fiddle, I warrant, and to quote Voltaire, Rousseau, and Helvetius, when he grows older." "What is your name, my dear little boy?" asked Lady Rohallion, caressingly; but she had to repeat the question thrice, and in different modes, before the child, who eyed her with evident distrust, replied, timidly: "Quentin Kennedy, madame." "Kennedy!" exclaimed all. "A gude auld Ayrshire name, ever since the days of Malcolm the Maiden!" said the quartermaster, striking his staff on the floor. "Rohallion's mother was a Kennedy," said the lady, a tender smile spreading over her face as she surveyed the orphan, "so the bairn could not have fallen into better hands than ours." "Indubitably not, my lady," chimed in the dominie; "nor could he find a sibber friend." "And your father, my dear child--your father?" urged Lady Rohallion. "My father--oh, my father is drowned! He went down into the sea with the big ship. Oh, ma mère! ma mère!" cried the little boy, in a sudden passion of grief, and seeking to escape from them, as the terrors of the past night, with a conviction of his present isolation and loneliness, seemed to come fully upon him. "And your mamma, my little love?" asked the lady, endearingly. "She is far away in France." "Where--in what town?" "Hélas, madame, I do not know." He sobbed bitterly, and Lady Rohallion wept as she kissed and fondled, and strove to reassure him by those caresses which none but one who has been a mother can bestow; but sometimes he repelled her with his plump little hands, while his dark eyes would sparkle and dilate with surprise and alarm. Then he would ask for his father again and again, for the child knew neither what death or drowning meant; and it was in vain they told him that his father had perished in the sea. He could not understand them, and to have shown the child the poor pale, sodden corpse that lay in the boat-shed on the shore would have been a useless cruelty that must have added to his grief and terror.