"My son--you? oh, mon Dieu! mon Dieu! and this was your secret at the Villa de Orsan," she exclaimed, in a very touching voice, as she pressed to her breast the somewhat bewildered Quentin, who, having been deeply engaged with Flora, had heard not a word of the foregoing conversation. After a time, however, she related that her husband, who had left Scotland in consequence of some quarrel, she believed, with his own family, had taken his mother's name of Kennedy, and entered the regiment de Berwick, in which he faithfully served the French monarchy, even after it was completely shattered by the Revolution. That, on a rumour rising that Monsieur, then residing at Holyrood, was about to reconstitute the Hundred Scottish Guards, with consent of the British Government, he departed hurriedly from France, leaving her at Arques, with her mother, Madame Duré de Lusart, who was then on her death-bed. Accompanied by the Abbé Lebrun, an old friend, he set out for Scotland, taking with him their little son. She added, that the vessel in which they sailed was a Scottish brig, under cartel, and bound for the Clyde; but it was, nevertheless, attacked by a French privateer, off the coast of Britain somewhere--where she knew not--but far to the north. The vessel was driven on a rock, and all perished save the Abbé Lebrun, who saw both her husband and child sink into the waves and die together. More fortunate, M. l'Abbé floated out to sea upon a spar, and was picked up next morning, in a most exhausted condition, by the same privateer which had done all the mischief. Notwithstanding all the skill of the great Doctor Thiebault, who came from Paris, her mother died, and now she found herself childless and alone in France--the terrible France of the Republic--and where she was hourly in peril of the guillotine as an aristocrat. The Bastile had been razed to the ground; that was good; but the change that had come over France was not for the better; "the gilded coach, the red-heeled slipper, and the supper of the Regency; the powdered marquise, for a smile of whose dimpled mouth the deadly rapier flashed in the moonlight--the perfumed beauty, for one of whose glances a poet would have ransacked his brain to render it smoothly in verse;" the high-bred old courtier, the gilded salon--had all given place to regiments of sans-culottes, to assassins, and the sovereign people--to the République démocratique et sociale; to planting trees of liberty, and grape-shotting the mob; to sham Roman citizens and tribunes; to women debating the existence of a God, and dancing nude in the fêtes of Venus; to a France of heroes and madmen--a Paris of "monkeys and tigers!"