It is a lonely old building, spotted with lichens, worn by storms, and perched upon the verge of a low, rocky cliff, up which the salt spray comes at times to the burial-ground. It is near the end of Mothcombe Bay, where the shore makes a turn to the southward.
Not a house is near it, the solitary hills and waves encompass it, and it is said that its smouldering tombstones would furnish ample matter for the 'meditations' of a Hervey. So there Flora was laid, and there Lennard was to be laid by her side when the time came.
Her death hardened his heart more than ever against his own family, and he began almost to forget that he ever bore any other name than hers—his adopted one.
In the kindness of his heart the major, as the lads—his son and nephew—grew up together, introduced both to neighbours and strangers equally as his sons, but most unwisely, as we shall ere long have to record.
Neither to Florian nor to Shafto Gyle did he reveal his real name, or the story of the quarrel with his family and their work; thus in and about Revelstoke all three passed under the name of MacIan now.
Madelon Galbraith, who had attended her mistress on her death-bed, and nursed her baby into boyhood, had now gone back to her native glen in the wilds of Ross. She proved, Lennard found, somewhat unfitted for the locality of Revelstoke, as her ways and ideas were foreign to those of the folks thereabouts; but she will have a prominent place in our story in the future.
But long, long Madelon wept over Florian, and pressed him often to her breast—'the baby of her bairn,' as she had called him—for as she had nursed him, so had she nursed his mother before him in the days when the victorious Ross-shire Buffs set up their tents at Khooshab, on the plains of Persia.
'Gude-by, calf of my heart,' were her parting words; 'I'll see ye yet again, Florian. If it were na for hope, the heart wad break!'