All was now bustle at Ellangowan.  The Laird and his servants, male and female, hastened to the wood of Warroch.  The tenants and cottagers in the neighbourhood lent their assistance, partly out of zeal, partly from curiosity.  Boats were manned to search the sea-shore, which, on the other side of the Point, rose into high and indented rocks.  A vague suspicion was entertained, though too horrible to be expressed, that the child might have fallen from one of these cliffs.

The evening had begun to close when the parties entered the wood, and dispersed different ways in quest of the boy and his companion.  The darkening of the atmosphere, and the hoarse sighs of the November wind through the naked trees, the rustling of the withered leaves which strewed the glades, the repeated halloos of the different parties, which often drew them together in expectation of meeting the objects of their search, gave a cast of dismal sublimity to the scene.

At length, after a minute and fruitless investigation through the wood, the searchers began to draw together into one body, and to compare notes.  The agony of the father grew beyond concealment, yet it scarcely equalled the anguish of the tutor.  ’Would to God I had died for him!’ the affectionate creature repeated, in notes of the deepest distress.  Those who were less interested rushed into a tumultuary discussion of chances and possibilities.  Each gave his opinion, and each was alternately swayed by that of the others.  Some thought the objects of their search had gone aboard the sloop; some that they had gone to a village at three miles’ distance; some whispered they might have been on board the lugger, a few planks and beams of which the tide now drifted ashore.

At this instant a shout was heard from the beach, so loud, so shrill, so piercing, so different from every sound which the woods that day had rung to, that nobody hesitated a moment to believe that it conveyed tidings, and tidings of dreadful import.  All hurried to the place, and, venturing without scruple upon paths which at another time they would have shuddered to look at, descended towards a cleft of the rock, where one boat’s crew was already landed.  ’Here, sirs, here! this way, for God’s sake! this way! this way!’ was the reiterated cry.  Ellangowan broke through the throng which had already assembled at the fatal spot, and beheld the object of their terror.  It was the dead body of Kennedy.  At first sight he seemed to have perished by a fall from the rocks, which rose above the spot on which he lay in a perpendicular precipice of a hundred feet above the beach.  The corpse was lying half in, half out of the water; the advancing tide, raising the arm and stirring the clothes, had given it at some distance the appearance of motion, so that those who first discovered the body thought that life remained.  But every spark had been long extinguished.