“No,” said the earl.

“You wish she had waited till your return?”

“Yes.”

The minister looked sorry; but still he evidently had not the slightest suspicion that aught was amiss.

“You must forgive my girl,” said he.  “She meant no disrespect to her dear old friend; but messages are so easily misconstrued.  And then, you see, a lover’s impatience must be considered.  We must excuse Captain Bruce, I think.  No wonder he was eager to get our Helen.”

And the old man smiled rather sadly, and looked wistfully round the Manse parlor, whence the familiar presence had gone, and yet seemed lingering still—­in her flower-stand, her little table, her work-basket; for Mr. Cardross would not have a single article moved.  “She will like to see them all when she comes back again,” said he.

“And you—­were you quite satisfied with the marriage?” asked the earl, making his question and the tone of it as commonplace and cautious as he could.

“Why not?  Helen loved him, and I loved Helen.  Besides, my own married life was so happy; God forbid I should grudge any happiness to my children.  I knew nothing but good of the lad; and you liked him too; Helen told me you had specially charged her, if ever she had an opportunity, to be kind to him.”

Lord Cairnforth almost groaned.

“Captain Bruce declared you must have said it because you knew of his attachment, which he had not had courage to express before, but had rather appeared to slight her, to hide his real feelings, until he was assured of your consent.”

The earl listened, utterly struck dumb.  The lies were so plausible, so systematic, so ingeniously fitted together, that he could almost have deluded himself into supposing them truth.  No wonder, then, that they had deluded simple Helen, and her even simpler and more unworldly father.

And now the cruel question presented itself, how far the father was to be undeceived?

The earl was, both by nature and circumstances, a reserved character; that is, he did not believe in the duty of every body to tell out every thing.  Helen often argued with him, and even laughed at him, for this; but he only smiled silently, and held to his own opinion, taught by experience.  He knew well that her life—­her free open, happy life, was not like his life, and never could be.  She had yet to learn that bitter but salutary self-restraint, which, if it has to suffer, often for others’ sake as well as for its own, prefers to suffer alone.

But Lord Cairnforth had learned this to the full.  Otherwise, as he sat in the Manse parlor, listening patiently to Helen’s father, and in the newness and suddenness of her loss, and the strong delusion of his own fond fancy, imagining every minute he heard her step on the stair and her voice in the hall, he must have utterly broken down.

He did not do so.  He maintained his righteous concealment, his noble deceit—­to the very last; spending the whole evening with Mr. Cardross, and quitting him without having betrayed a word of what he dreaded—­what he was almost sure of.