His mother sorrowed for him in sunny France beyond the sea, where she may never see him more, or know that he survived the wreck in which her husband perished; and now daily another received his morning kiss, and watched his footsteps and gambols; and nightly hushed him to sleep, smoothed the coverlet, caressed his ruddy cheeks and golden hair; yet that poor bereaved mother was never absent from the thoughts of good Lady Rohallion, who had now taken her place. Of his many kisses and caresses, she felt that she was robbing that poor unknown, the affectionate "Fifine" of the dead man's letter; but how to find her, how to restore him, stultified and rendered every way impossible as all such attempts must be, by the war now waged by every sea and shore between the two countries? Though little Quentin, we grieve to say, was gradually forgetting his own mother and learning to love his adopted one, there were times when, natheless all Lady Rohallion's sweetness and tenderness, he felt that there was something lacking--something he missed; he knew not what, unless it were that he longed "For the touch of a vanished hand, And the sound of a voice that is still." A fortnight had passed away since the letter of Lord Rohallion had been brought by John Girvan from Maybole, and still there were no further tidings of his return; so the lady became sad and anxious, for she trembled at the idea of his returning by sea. On one of the first nights of December, when the wind was moaning about the old walls of the castle, and the angry hiss of the sea was heard on the rocks below, she sat alone, by Quentin's little bed. He had just dropped asleep. He occupied the same cot in which her own son Cosmo, Master of Rohallion, had been wont to sleep when a child about the same age. It was prettily gilt and surmounted by a coronet; the curtains were drawn apart, and by the subdued light of a night-lamp, she could see the pure profile and rosy cheeks of the boy, as he reposed on a soft white pillow, in the calm sleep of childhood. She could almost imagine that her son Cosmo, the tall captain of the Guards, was again a child and sleeping there, or that she was a young wife again and not an old woman, and so, as thoughts that came unbidden poured fast upon her, she began to recal the years that had rolled away. Then out of the thronging memories of the past, there arose a vision of a fair-haired and handsome young man--one who loved her well before Rohallion came--his younger brother; and with this image came the memory of many a happy ramble long, long ago, in the green summer woods of pleasant Nithsdale, when the sunshine was declining on the heights of Queensberry, or casting shadows on the plains of Closeburn or the grassy pastoral uplands through which the blue stream winds to meet the Solway--and where the voices of the mavis, the merle, and the cushat-dove were heard in every coppice.