nce, honor, honesty. And he was
Helen's husband--Helen, the true and the good; the poor minister's
daughter, who had been brought up to think that it was better to starve
upon porridge and salt than to owe any one a halfpenny! What sort of a
marriage could it possibly turn out to be?

To this question, which Lord Cairnforth asked himself continually, in an
agony of doubt, no answer came--no clue whatsoever, though, from even
the first week, Helen's letters reached the Manse as regularly as clock
work. But they were merely outside letters--very sweet and loving
--telling her father every thing that could interest him about foreign
places, persons, and things; only of herself and her own feelings saying
almost nothing. It was unlikely she should: the earl laid this comfort
to his soul twenty times a day. She was married now; she could not be
expected to be frank as in her girlhood; still, this total silence, so
unnatural to her candid disposition, alarmed him.

But there was no resource--no help. Into that secret chamber which
her own hand thus barred, no other hand could presume to break. No one
could say--ought to say to a wife, "Your husband is a scoundrel."

And besides, (to this hope Lord Cairnforth clung with a desperation
heroic as bitter), Captain Bruce might not be an irredeemable scoundrel;
and he might--there was still a chance--have married Helen not
altogether from interested motives. She was so lovable that he might
have loved her, or have grown to love her, even though he had slighted
her at first.

"He must have loved her--he could not help it," groaned the earl,
inwardly, when the minister and others stabbed him from time to time
with little episodes of the courting days--the captain's devotedness
to Helen, and Helen's surprised, fond delight at being so much "made of"
by the first lover who had ever wooed her, and a lover whom externally
any girl would have been proud of. And then the agonized cry of another
faithful heart went up to heaven--"God grant he may love her; that
she may be happy--anyhow--any where!"

But all this while, with the almost morbid prevision of his character,
Lord Cairnforth took every precaution that Helen should be guarded, as
much as was possible, in case there should befall her that terrible
calamity, the worst that can happen to a woman--of being compelled to
treat the husband and father, the natural protector, helper, and guide
of herself and her children, as no