“And if it succeeded?” said Helen, almost in a whisper, as she returned the letter.

The earl smiled—­a bright, vague, but hopeful smile—­“I might be a little more able to do things—­to live my life with a little less trouble to myself, and possibly to other people.  Well, Helen?  You don’t speak, but I think your eyes say ‘Try!’”

“Yes, my dear.”  She sometimes, though not often now, lest it might vex him by making him still so much a child, called him “my dear.”

This ended the conversation, which Helen did not communicate to any body, nor referred to again with Lord Cairnforth, though she pondered over it and him continually.

A week after this, Mr. Menteith unexpectedly appeared at the Castle, and after a long consultation with Mr. Cardross, it was agreed that what seemed the evident wish of the earl should be accomplished if possible; that he, Malcolm, Mrs. Campbell, and Mr. Menteith should start for London immediately.

Such a journey was then a very different thing from what it is now, and to so helpless a traveler as Lord Cairnforth its difficulties were doubled.  He had to post the whole distance in his own carriage, which was fitted up so as to be as easy as possible in locomotion, besides being so arranged that he could sleep in it if absolutely necessary, for ordinary beds and ordinary chairs were sometimes very painful to him.  Had he been poor, in all probability he would long ago have died—­of sheer suffering.

Fortunately, it was summer time.  He staid at Cairnforth till after his birthday, “for I may never see another,” said he, with that gentle smile which seemed to imply that he would be neither glad nor sorry, and then he started.  He was quite cheerful himself, but Mr. Menteith and Mrs. Campbell looked very anxious.  Malcolm was full of superstitious forebodings, and Helen Cardross and her father, when they bade him good-by and watched the carriage drive slowly from the Castle doors, felt as sad as if they were parting from him, not for London, but for the other world.

Not until he was gone did they recognize how much they missed him:  in the Manse parlor where “the earl’s chair” took its regular place—­in the pretty Manse garden, where its wheels had made in the gravel walks deep marks which Helen could not bear to have erased—­in his pew at the kirk, where the minister had learned to look Sunday after Sunday for that earnest, listening face.  Mr. Cardross, too, found it dull no longer to have his walk up to the Castle, and his hour or two’s rest in the yet unfinished library, which he and Lord Cairnforth had already begun to consult about, and where the earl was always to be found, sitting at his little table with his books about him, and Malcolm lurking within call, or else placed contentedly by the French window, looking out upon that blaze of beauty into which the countess’s flower-garden had grown.  How little they had thought—­the young father and mother, cut off in the midst of their plans, that their poor child would one day so keenly enjoy them all, and have such sore need for these or any other simple and innocent enjoyments.