The yelling fiends, the burning house, the awful horror of fright and danger, the shock to her health and strength, the storm,--for the night was a wild and tempestuous one, which drenched her to the skin,--from all these she might have recovered, had not her boy, her first-born, been carried into her, bruised and dead,--dead, through an accident of burning rafters and falling stones; an accident, they said; yet as really murdered as though they had wilfully and brutally stricken him down.
"After that I saw that she, too, would die, were she not taken back to our old home.

The preparations were hastily made; we turned our faces towards England; we hoped to reach it at least before another pair of eyes saw the light, but hoped in vain.

There on the broad sea Francesca was born.

There her mother died.

There was she buried." It was with extreme difficulty Ercildoune had controlled his face and voice, through the last of this distressing recital, and with the final word he bowed his forehead on the picture-frame,--convulsed with agony,--while voiceless sobs, like spasms, shook his form.