While passing through the outer drawing-room, which was quaintly furnished with _marqueterie_ cabinets, tables, and bookcases, with chairs and _fauteuils_ of Queen Anne's time, they heard voices in the inner apartment, and one of them was Lady Rohallion's, pitched in a louder key than was her wont, so they paused, unfortunately, only to hear the LAST words of her conversation with Flora--words which fell like molten lead on the ears and in the heart of the listener, whom they most concerned. "--We know nothing of him--he may be base-born for aught that we can tell, and Lord Rohallion shall learn that Quentin Kennedy--a brat, a very beggar's brat--shall never come between our own son and his success--and so, young lady, your humble servant!" These bitter, bitter words--words such as he had never heard from _her_ lips before, made Quentin reel as if stunned, so that with the effect they produced upon him, added to that of the recent blow, he would have fallen had not the quartermaster caught him in his arms, and held him up, surveying him the while with a kind and father-like expression of solicitude and bewilderment in his old and weather-worn visage. Rousing himself, with his teeth set and his eyes flashing, he made three efforts to turn the door handle and enter the room. It was _his_ hand that Flora had heard upon the lock when she started from the sofa and fled to her own apartment in a passion of tears, so that when he entered the inner drawing-room it was empty, and thus Quentin knew not--though his heart foreboded--to whom the injurious words of Lady Rohallion had been addressed; but their tenor decided him at once in a preconceived intention of leaving, and for ever, the only home he had now in the world, and almost the only one of which he had any distinct memory. "This is no longer a place for me, John Girvan, and so sure as God sees and hears me, I shall leave it this very night!" he exclaimed, as with his eyes flashing and full of tears, and his heart now filled only by new, and hitherto unknown emotions of sorrow, bitterness, and mortification (unknown to him at least) he walked to and fro upon the gun-battery, where the 24-pounders of _La Bonne Citoyenne_ faced the waves of the Firth, on which the last rays of a waning moon were shining coldly and palely, especially on the ridge of foam that boiled for ever over the Partan Craig. "And whither would ye go, Quentin?" asked Girvan, who felt in his honest heart an intense commiseration for the lonely lad, knowing that were he to remain after the insult he had received, and the words he had heard, it would argue a poverty of spirit he would be loth to find in Quentin; "whither would ye go?" "Away to France, to seek my mother."