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.
'My bairn! my bairn!' cried the distracted father, 'where can he be ?' A dozen mouths were opened to communicate hopes which no one felt.

Some one at length mentioned--the gipsies! In a moment Ellangowan had reascended the cliffs, flung himself upon the first horse he met, and rode furiously to the huts at Derncleugh.