a full-rigged ship was descried in the offing giving signals of distress.  Night was coming on very fast, and the sea was yet running too high for a boat to live, but the gallant captain furled his topsails once more to await the morning.  It could be seen from her signals that the ship was living throughout the night, but at dawn she foundered before the Sally’s boats could be put in the water; one of them was ground to pieces on the falls.  Out of the ship’s company and passengers they picked up but five souls, four sailors and a little girl of two years or thereabouts.  The men knew nothing more of her than that she had come aboard at Brest with her mother, a quiet, delicate lady who spoke little with the other passengers.  The ship was ‘La Favourite du Roy’, bound for the French Indies.

Captain Stanwix’s wife, who was a good, motherly person, took charge of the little orphan, and arriving at Carvel Hall delivered her to my grandfather, who brought her up as his own daughter.  You may be sure the emblem of Catholicism found upon her was destroyed, and she was baptized straightway by Doctor Hilliard, my grandfather’s chaplain, into the Established Church.  Her clothes were of the finest quality, and her little handkerchief had worked into the corner of it a coronet, with the initials “E de T” beside it.  Around her neck was that locket with the gold chain which I have so often shown you, on one side of which is the miniature of the young officer in his most Christian Majesty’s uniform, and on the other a yellow-faded slip of paper with these words:  “Elle est la mienne, quoiqu’elle ne porte pas mou nom.”  “She is mine, although she does not bear my name.”

My grandfather wrote to the owners of ‘La Favourite du Roy’, and likewise directed his English agent to spare nothing in the search for some clew to the child’s identity.  All that he found was that the mother had been entered on the passenger-list as Madame la Farge, of Paris, and was bound for Martinico.  Of the father there was no trace whatever.  The name “la Farge” the agent, Mr. Dix, knew almost to a certainty was assumed, and the coronet on the handkerchief implied that the child was of noble parentage.  The meaning conveyed by the paper in the locket, which was plainly a clipping from a letter, was such that Mr. Carvel never showed it to my mother, and would have destroyed it had he not felt that some day it might aid in solving the mystery.  So he kept it in his strongbox, where he thought it safe from prying eyes.  But my Uncle Grafton, ever a deceitful lad, at length discovered the key and read the paper, and afterwards used the knowledge he thus obtained as a reproach and a taunt against my mother.  I cannot even now write his name without repulsion.

This new member of the household was renamed Elizabeth Carvel, though they called her Bess, and of a course she was greatly petted and spoiled, and ruled all those about her.  As she grew from childhood to womanhood her beauty became talked about, and afterwards, when Mistress Carvel went to the Assembly, a dozen young sparks would crowd about the door of her coach, and older and more serious men lost their heads on her account.