This might have been increased by certain discoveries, which, during the summer, when he came to look into his affairs, Lord Cairnforth made.  He found that money which he had entrusted to Captain Bruce for various purposes had been appropriated, or misappropriated, in different ways —­conduct scarcely exposing the young man to legal investigation, and capable of being explained away as “carelessness”—­“unpunctuality in money matters”—­and so on, but conduct of which no strictly upright, honorable person would ever have been guilty.  This fact accounted for another—­the captain’s having expressed ardent gratitude for a sum which he said the earl had given him for his journey and marriage expenses, which, though Mr. Cardross’s independent spirit rather revolted from the gift, at least satisfied him about Helen’s comfort during her temporary absence.  And once more, for Helen’s sake, the earl kept silence.  But he felt as if every good and tender impulse of his nature were hardening into stone.

Hardened at the core Lord Cairnforth could never be; no man can whose heart has once admitted into its deepest sanctuary the love of One who, when all human loves fail, still whispers, “We will come in unto him, and make our abode with him”—­ay, be it the forlornest bodily tabernacle in which immortal soul ever dwelt.  But there came an outer crust of hardness over his nature which was years before it quite melted away.  Common observers might not perceive it—­Mr. Cardross even did not; still it was there.

The thing was inevitable.  Right or wrong, deservedly or undeservedly, most of us have at different crises of our lives known this feeling—­ the bitter sense of being wronged; of having opened one’s heart to the sunshine, and had it all blighted and blackened with frost; of having laid one’s self down in a passion of devotedness for beloved feet to walk upon, and been trampled upon, and beaten down to the dust.  And as months slipped by, and there came no Helen, this feeling, even against his will and his conscience, grew very much upon Lord Cairnforth.  In time it might have changed him to a bitter, suspicious, disappointed cynic, had there not also come to him, with strong conviction, one truth —­a truth preached on the shores of Galilee eighteen hundred years ago —­the only truth that can save the wronged heart from breaking—­ that he who gives away only a cup of cold water shall in no wise lose his reward.  Still, the reward is not temporal, and is rarely rewarded in kind.  He—­and He alone—­to whom the debt is due, repays it; not in our, but in his own way.  One only consolation remains to the sufferers from ingratitude, but that one is all-sufficing:  “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto the least of these little ones, ye have done it unto Me.”

All autumn, winter, and during another spring and summer, Helen’s letters—­most fond, regular, and (to her father) satisfactory—­ contained incessant and eager hopes of return, which were never fulfilled.  And gradually she ceased to give any reason for their non-fulfillment, simply saying, with a sad brevity of silence, which one, at least, of her friends knew how to comprehend and appreciate, that her coming home at present was “impossible.”