“I asked you to come to me in the carriage,” said he, after they had spoken a while about ordinary things.  “Before we reach home, I think we ought to have a little talk upon some few matters which we have never referred to as yet.  Are you able for this?”

“Oh yes, but—­I can’t—­I can’t!” and a sudden expression of trouble and fear darkened the widow’s face.  “Do not ask me any questions about the past.  It is all over now; it seems like a dream—­ as if I had never been away from Cairnforth.”

“Let it be so then, Helen, my dear,” replied the earl, tenderly.  “Indeed, I never meant otherwise.  It is far the best.”

Thus, both at the time and ever after, he laid, and compelled others to lay, the seal of silence upon those two sad years, the secrets of which were buried in Captain Bruce’s quiet grave in Grayfriars’ church-yard.

“Helen,” he continued, “I am not going to ask you a single question; I am only going to tell you a few things, which you are to tell your father at the first opportunity, so as to place you in a right position toward him, and whatever his health may be, to relieve his mind entirely both as to you and Boy.”

“Boy” the little Alexander had already begun to be called.  “Boy” par excellence, for even at that early period of his existence he gave tokens of being a most masculine character, with a resolute will of his own, and a power of howling till he got his will which delighted Nurse Campbell exceedingly.  He was already a thorough Cardross—­not in the least a Bruce; he inherited Helen’s great blue eyes, large frame, and healthy temperament, and was, in short, that repetition of the mother in the son which Dame Nature delights in, and out of which she sometimes makes the finest and noblest men that the world ever sees.

“Boy has been wide awake these two hours, noticing every thing,” said his mother, with a mother’s firm conviction that this rather imaginative fact was the most interesting possible to every body.  “He might have known the loch quite well already, by the way he kept staring at it.”

“He will know it well enough by-and by,” said the earl, smiling.  “You are aware, Helen, that he and you are permanently coming home.”

“To the Manse? yes!  My dear father! he will keep us there during his life time.  Afterward we must take our chance, my boy and I.”

“Not quite that.  Are you not aware—­I thought, from circumstances, you must have guessed it long ago—­that Cairnforth Castle, and my whole property, will be yours sometime?”

“I will tell you no untruth, Lord Cairnforth.  I was aware of it.  That is, he—­I mean it was suspected that you had meant it once.  I found this out—­don’t ask me how—­shortly after I was married; and I determined, as the only chance of avoiding it—­and several other things—­never to write to you again; never to take the least means of bringing myself—­us—­back to your memory.”