He had not been at the Manse for two or three weeks, and had not even heard of the family for several days, when, looking up from his seat in church, he was startled by the apparition of an unfamiliar face in the pulpit—­a voluble, flowery-tongued, foolish young assistant, evidently caught haphazard to fill the place which Mr. Cardross, during a long term of years, had never vacated, except at communion seasons.  It gave his faithful friend and pupil a sensation almost of pain to see any new figure there, and not the dear old minister’s, with his long white hair, his earnest manner, and his simple, short sermon.  Shorter and simpler the older he grew, till he often declared he should end by preaching like the beloved apostle John, who, tradition says, in his latter days, did nothing but repeat, over and over again, to all around him, his one exhortation—­he, the disciple whom Jesus loved—­

“Little children, love one another.”

On inquiry after service, the earl found that Mr. Cardross had been ailing all week, and had had on Saturday to procure in haste this substitute.  But, on going to the Manse, the earl found him much as usual, only complaining of a numbness in his arm.

“And,” he said, with a composure very different from his usual nervousness about the slightest ailment, “Now I remember, my mother died of paralysis.  I wish Helen would come home.”

“Shall she be sent for?” suggested Lord Cairnforth.

“Oh no—­not the least necessity.  Besides, she says she is coming.”

“She has long said that.”

“But now she is determined to make the strongest effort to be with us at the New Year.  Read her letter—­it came yesterday; a week later than usual.  I should have sent it up to the Castle, for it troubled me a little, especially the postscript; can you make it out? part of it is under the seal.  It is in answer to what I told her of Duncan; he was always her pet, you know.  How she used to carry him about the garden, even when he grew quite a big boy!  Poor Helen!”

While the minister went on talking, feebly and wanderingly, in a way that at another time would have struck the earl as something new and rather alarming, Lord Cairnforth eagerly read the letter.  It ended thus: 

“Tell Dunnie I am awfully glad he is to be a minister.  I hope all my brothers will settle down in dear old Scotland, work hard, and pay their way like honest men.  And bid them, as soon as ever they can, to marry honest women—­good, loving Scotch lassies—­no fremd (archaic:  strange, foreign) folk.  Tell them never to fear for ‘poortith cauld,’ as Mr. Burns wrote about; it’s easy to bear, when it’s honest poverty.  I would rather see my five brothers living on porridge and milk—­ wives, and weans, and all—­than see them like these foreigners, counts, barons, and princes though they be.  Father, I hate them all.  And I mind always the way I was brought up, and that I was once a minister’s daughter in dear and bonnie Cairnforth.”