, but she was still too much awed to make
any demonstration, save a convulsive pressure of the Queen's hand, and
the murmuring of the Latin prayer distressed her.

Presently Mary resumed. "Long, long did I hope my little one was
safely sheltered from all my troubles in the dear old cloisters of
Soissons, and that it was caution in my good aunt the abbess that
prevented my hearing of her; but through my faithful servants, my Lord
Flemyng, who had been charged to speed her from Scotland, at length let
me know that the ship in which she sailed, the Bride of Dunbar, had
been never heard of more, and was thought to have been cast away in a
tempest that raged two days after she quitted Dunbar. And I--I shed
some tears, but I could well believe that the innocent babe had been
safely welcomed among the saints, and I could not grieve that she was,
as I thought, spared from the doom that rests upon the race of Stewart.
Till one week back, I gave thanks for that child of sorrow as cradled
in Paradise."

Then followed a pause, and then Cis said in a low trembling voice, "And
it was from the wreck of the Bride of Dunbar that I was taken?"

"Thou hast said it, child! My bairn, my bonnie bairn!" and the girl
was absorbed in a passionate embrace and strained convulsively to a
bosom which heaved with the sobs of tempestuous emotion, and the
caresses were redoubled upon her again and again with increasing
fervour that almost frightened her.

"Speak to me! Speak to me! Let me hear my child's voice."

"Oh, madam--"

"Call me mother! Never have I heard that sound from my child's lips. I
have borne two children, two living children, only to be stripped of
both. Speak, child--let me hear thee."

Cis contrived to say "Mother, my mother," but scarcely with effusion.
It was all so strange, and she could not help feeling as if Susan were
the mother she knew and was at ease with. All this was much too like a
dream, from which she longed to awake. And there was Mrs. Kennedy too,
rising up and crying quite indignantly--"Mother indeed! Is that all
thou hast to say, as though it were a task under the rod, when thou art
owned for her own bairn by the fairest and most ill-used queen in
Christendom? Out on thee! Have the Southron loons chilled thine heart
and made thee no leal to thine ain mother that hath hungered for thee?"

The angry tones, and her sense of her own shortcomings, could only make
Cis burst into tears.

"Hush, hush,