unknown. They used to come twice
a year, at WhitSunday and Martinmas, to pay their rents to Mr. Menteith;
to inquire for my lord's health, and to drink in abundance of whisky;
but the earl himself they never saw, and their feelings toward him were
a mixture of reverence and awe.

It was different with the earl's immediate neighbors, the humble
inhabitants of the clachan. These, during the last nine years, had
gradually grown familiar, first with the little childish form, carried
about tenderly in Malcolm's arms, and then with the muffled figure,
scarcely less of a child to look at, which Malcolm, and sometimes Miss
Cardross, drove about in a pony-chaise. At the kirk especially, though
he was always carefully conveyed in first, and borne out last of all the
congregation, his face--his sweet, kind, beautiful face was known to
them all, and the children were always taught to doff their bonnets or
pull their forelocks to the earl.

Beyond that, nobody knew any thing about him. His large property,
accumulating every year, was entirely under the management of Mr.
Menteith; he himself took no interest in it; and the way by which the
former heirs of Cairnforth had used to make themselves popular from
boyhood, by going among the tenantry, hunting, shooting, fishing, and
boating, was impossible to this earl. His distant dependents hardly
remembered his existence, and he took no heed of theirs, until a few
months before he came of age, when one of these slight chances which
often determine so much changed the current of affairs.

If was just before the "term." Mr. Menteith had been expected all day,
but had not arrived, and the earl had taken a long drive with Helen and
her father through the Cairnforth woods, where the wild daffodils were
beginning to succeed the fading snowdrops, and the mavises had been
heard to sing those few rich notes which belong especially to the
twilights of early spring, and earnest of all the richness, and glory,
and delight of the year. The little party seemed to feel it--that
soft, dreamy sense of dawning spring, which stirs all the soul,
especially in youth, with a vague looking forward to some pleasantness
which never comes. They sat, silent and talking by turns, beside the
not unwelcome fire, in a corner of the large library.

"We shall miss Alick a good deal this spring," said Helen, recurring to
a subject of which the family heart was full, the departure of the
eldest son to "begin th