busy moment.'

Darsie intimated that he had already heard the tragic story of Sir
Alberick Redgauntlet.

'I need only say, then,' proceeded Lilias, 'that our father and uncle
felt the family doom in its full extent. They were both possessed of
considerable property, which was largely increased by our father's
marriage, and were both devoted to the service of the unhappy House
of Stuart; but (as our mother at least supposed) family considerations
might have withheld her husband from joining openly in the affair of
1745, had not the high influence which the younger brother possessed
over the elder, from his more decided energy of character, hurried him
along with himself into that undertaking.

'When, therefore, the enterprise came to the fatal conclusion which
bereaved our father of his life and consigned his brother to exile, Lady
Redgauntlet fled from the north of England, determined to break off all
communication with her late husband's family, particularly his brother,
whom she regarded as having, by their insane political enthusiasm, been
the means of his untimely death; and determined that you, my brother, an
infant, and that I, to whom she had just given birth, should be brought
up as adherents of the present dynasty. Perhaps she was too hasty in
this determination--too timidly anxious to exclude, if possible, from
the knowledge of the very spot where we existed, a relation so nearly
connected with us as our father's only brother. But you must make
allowance for what she had suffered. See, brother,' she said, pulling
her glove off, 'these five blood-specks on my arm are a mark by which
mysterious Nature has impressed, on an unborn infant, a record of its
father's violent death and its mother's miseries.' [Several persons
have brought down to these days the impressions which Nature had thus
recorded, when they were yet babes unborn. One lady of quality, whose
father was long under sentence of death previous to the Rebellion, was
marked on the back of the neck by the sign of a broad axe. Another whose
kinsmen had been slain in battle and died on the scaffold to the number
of seven, bore a child spattered on the right shoulder and down the
arm with scarlet drops, as if of blood. Many other instances might be
quoted.]

'You were not, then, born when my father suffered?' said Darsie.

'Alas, no!' she replied; 'nor were you a twelvemonth old. It was no
wonder that my mother, after going through such scenes of agony