“It’s bribery, and against my principles,” the earl would say, half sadly.  “But, if I did not give him things, how else could Boy learn to love me?”

Helen never answered this, no more than she used answer many similar speeches in the earl’s childhood.  She knew time would prove them all to be wrong.

What sort of idea the child really had of this wonderful donor, the source of most of his pleasures, who yet was so different externally from every body else; who never moved from the wheel-chair; who neither caressed him nor played with him, and whom he was not allowed to play with, but only lifted up sometimes to kiss softly the kind face which always smiled down upon him with a sort of “superior love”—­what the child’s childish notion of his friend was no one could of course discover.  But it must have been a mingling of awe and affectionateness; for he would often—­even before he could walk—­crawl up to the little chair, steady himself by it, and then look into Lord Cairnforth’s face with those mysterious baby eyes, full of questioning, but yet without the slightest fear.  And once, when his mother was teaching him his first hymn—­

“Gentle Jesus, meek and mild,
Look upon a little child,”

Boy startled her by the sudden remark—­one of the divine profanities that are often falling from the innocent lips of little children—­

“I know Jesus.  He is the earl.”

And then Helen tried, in some simple way, to make the child understand about Lord Cairnforth, and how he had been all his life so heavily afflicted; but Boy could not comprehend it as affliction at all.  There seemed to him something not inferior, but superior to all other people in that motionless figure, with its calm sweet face—­who was never troubled, never displeased—­whom every body delighted to obey, and at whose feet lay treasures untold.

“I think Boy likes me,” Lord Cairnforth would say, when he met the upturned beaming face as the child, in an ecstasy of expectation, ran to meet him.  “His love may last as long as the playthings do.”

But the earl was mistaken, as Helen knew.  His love-victory had been in something deeper than toys and “goodies.”  Even when their charm began to cease Boy still crept up to the little chair, and looked from the empty footboard up to the loving face, which no one, man, woman, or child, ever regarded without something far higher than pity.

And, by degrees, Boy, or “Carr”—­which, as being the diminutive for his second Christian name, Cardross, he was often called now—­found a new attraction in his friend.  He would listen with wide-open eyes, and attention that never flagged, to the interminable “tories” which the earl told him, out of the same brilliant imagination which had once used to delight his uncles in the boat.  And so, little by little, the child and the man grew to be “a pair of friends”—­familiar and fond, but with a certain tender reverence always between them, which had the most salutary effect on the younger.