Two elders stood there beside the plate—­white-headed farmers, who remembered both the late lord and the one before him.

“You’s the earl,” whispered they, and came forward respectfully; then, startled by the unexpected and pitiful sight, they shrank back; but either the boy did not notice this, or was so used to it that he showed no surprise.

“My purse, Malcolm,” the small, soft voice was heard to say.

“Ay, my lord.  What will ye put into the plate?”

“A guinea, I think, today, because I am so very happy.”

This answer, which the two elders overheard, was told by them next day to every body, and remembered along the loch-side for years.

Cairnforth Kirk, like most other Scotch churches of ancient date, is very plain within and without, and the congregation then consisted almost entirely of hillside farmers, shepherds, and the like, who arrived in families—­dogs, and all, for the dogs always came to church, and behaved there as decorously as their masters.  Many the people walked eight, ten, and even twelve miles, from the extreme boundary of the parish, and waited about in the kirk or kirk-yard on fine Sundays, and in the Manse kitchen on wet ones—­which were much the most frequent—­during the two hours’ interval between sermons.

In the whole congregation there was hardly a person above the laboring class except in the minister’s pew and that belonging to the Castle, which had been newly lined and cushioned, and in a corner of which, safely deposited by Malcolm, the little earl now sat—­sat always, even during the prayer, at which some of the congregation looked reprovingly round, but only saw the little figure wrapped in a plaid, and the sweet, wan, childish, and yet unchild-like face, with the curly dark hair, and large dark eyes.

Whatever in the earl was “no a’richt,” it certainly could not be his mind, for a brighter, more intelligent countenance was never seen.  It quite startled the minister with the intentness of its gaze from the moment he ascended the pulpit; and though he tried not to look that way, and was very nervous, he could not get over the impression it made.  It was to him almost like a face from the grave—­this strange, eerie child’s face, so strongly resembling that of the dead countess, who, despite the difference in rank, had, during the brief year she lived and reigned at Cairnforth, been almost like an equal friend and companion to his own dead wife.  Their two faces—­Lady Cairnforth’s as she looked the last time he saw her in her coffin, and his wife’s as she lay in hers—­mingled together, and affected him powerfully.

The good minister was not remarkable for the brilliance of his sermons, which he wrote and “committed”—­that is, learned by heart, to deliver in pseudo-extempore fashion, as was the weary custom of most Scotch ministers of his time.  But this Sunday, all that he had committed slipped clean out of his memory.  He preached as he had never been known to preach before, and never preached again—­with originality, power, eloquence; speaking from his deepest heart, as if the words thence pouring out had been supernaturally put into it; which, with a superstition that approached to sublimest faith, he afterward solemnly believe they had been.