It was different with the earl’s immediate neighbors, the humble inhabitants of the clachan.  These, during the last nine years, had gradually grown familiar, first with the little childish form, carried about tenderly in Malcolm’s arms, and then with the muffled figure, scarcely less of a child to look at, which Malcolm, and sometimes Miss Cardross, drove about in a pony-chaise.  At the kirk especially, though he was always carefully conveyed in first, and borne out last of all the congregation, his face—­his sweet, kind, beautiful face was known to them all, and the children were always taught to doff their bonnets or pull their forelocks to the earl.

Beyond that, nobody knew any thing about him.  His large property, accumulating every year, was entirely under the management of Mr. Menteith; he himself took no interest in it; and the way by which the former heirs of Cairnforth had used to make themselves popular from boyhood, by going among the tenantry, hunting, shooting, fishing, and boating, was impossible to this earl.  His distant dependents hardly remembered his existence, and he took no heed of theirs, until a few months before he came of age, when one of these slight chances which often determine so much changed the current of affairs.

If was just before the “term.”  Mr. Menteith had been expected all day, but had not arrived, and the earl had taken a long drive with Helen and her father through the Cairnforth woods, where the wild daffodils were beginning to succeed the fading snowdrops, and the mavises had been heard to sing those few rich notes which belong especially to the twilights of early spring, and earnest of all the richness, and glory, and delight of the year.  The little party seemed to feel it—­that soft, dreamy sense of dawning spring, which stirs all the soul, especially in youth, with a vague looking forward to some pleasantness which never comes.  They sat, silent and talking by turns, beside the not unwelcome fire, in a corner of the large library.

“We shall miss Alick a good deal this spring,” said Helen, recurring to a subject of which the family heart was full, the departure of the eldest son to “begin the world” in Mr. Menteith’s office in Edinburg.  He was not a very clever lad, but he was sensible and steady, and blessed with that practical mother-wit which is often better than brains.  The minister, though he had been bemoaning his boy’s “little Latin and less Greek,” and comparing Alick’s learning very disadvantageously with that of the earl, to whom Mr. Cardross confided all his troubles, nevertheless seemed both proud and hopeful of his eldest son, the heir to his honest name, which Alick would now carry out into a far wider world than that of the poor minister of Cairnforth, and doubtless, in good time, transmit honorably to a third generation.

“Yes,” added the father, when innumerable castles in the air had been built and rebuilt for Alick’s future, “I’ll not deny that my lad is a good lad.  He is the hope of the house, and he knows it.  It’s little of worldly gear that he’ll get for many a day, and he tells me he will have to work from morning till night; but he rather enjoys the prospect than not.”