Mr. Menteith smiled as if he did not quite comprehend this sort of felicity.  “But, in any case, Lord Cairnforth seems to have, what will be quite as useful to him as brains, a very kindly heart.  He does not shut himself up in a morbid way, but takes an interest in all about him.  Look at him, now, how heartily he is laughing at something your daughter has said.  Really, those two seem quite happy.”

“Helen makes every body happy,” fondly said Helen’s father.

“I believe so.  I shall be sending down one of my big lads to look after her some day.  I’ve eight of them, Mr. Cardross, all to be educated, settled, and wived.  It’s a ‘sair fecht,’ I assure you.”

“I know it; but still it has its compensations.”

“Ay, they’re all strong, likely, braw fellows, who can push their own way in the world and fend for themselves.  Not like—­” he glanced over to the group on the grass, and stopped.  Yet at that moment a hearty trill of thoroughly childish laughter seemed to rebuke the regrets of both fathers.

“That child certainly has the sweetest nature—­the most remarkable faculty for enjoying other people’s enjoyments, in which he himself can never share.”

“Yes, it was always so, from the time he was a mere infant.  Dr. Hamilton often noticed it, and said it was a good omen.”

“I believe so,” rejoined Mr. Cardross, earnestly.  “I feel sure that if Lord Cairnforth lives, he will neither have a useless nor an unhappy life.”

“Let us hope not.  And yet—­poor little fellow!—­to be the last Earl of Cairnforth, and to be—­such as he is!”

“He is what God made him, what God willed him to be,” said the minister, solemnly.  “We know not why it should be so; we only know that it is, and we can not alter it.  We can not remove from him his heavy cross, but I think we can help him to bear it.”

“You are a good man, Mr. Cardross,” replied the Edinburg writer, huskily, as he rose from his seat, and declining another glass of the claret, of which, under some shallow pretext, he had sent a supply into the minister’s empty cellar, he crossed the grass-plot, and spent the rest of the evening beside his ward and Helen.

Chapter 5

Days, months, and years slip smoothly by on the shores of Loch Beg.  Even now, though the cruelly advancing finger of Civilization has touched it, dotted it with genteel villas on either side, plowed it with smoky steam boats, and will shortly frighten the innocent fishes by dropping a marine telegraph wire across the mouth of the loch, it is a peaceful place still.  But when the last Earl of Cairnforth was a child it was all peace.  In summertime a few stray tourists would wander past it, wondering at its beauty; but in winter it had hardly any communication with the outer world.  The Manse, the Castle, and the clachan, with a few outlying farm-houses, comprised the whole of the Cairnforth; and the little peninsula, surrounded on three sides by water, and on the fourth by hills, was sufficiently impregnable and isolated to cause existence to flow on there very quietly, in what townspeople call dullness, and country people repose.