"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.
Lady Rohallion, pointing upward as he sat on her knee, told him that his father was in heaven, and that in time he would meet him there; for, of such as he was, poor orphan, was the kingdom of heaven made; but in heaven or in the sea was all one for a time to little Quentin Kennedy, who wept bitterly, and noisily too, till he grew weary, or became consoled, by the winning ways of his gentle protectress, for of course the poor child knew not the nature of his awful loss and bereavement.
While the boy, already temporarily forgetful of his griefs, was stretched on the soft, warm hearth-rug before the fire that blazed in the parlour grate, and occupied himself with the gambols of a wiry Skye-terrier, John Girvan handed to Lady Rohallion the relics he had found on the drowned man.
"A ring!" said she; "this is painfully interesting; and it has an inscription."