wholesome nature, so entirely free from moods, or fancies, or crochets
of any kind--those sad vagaries of ill-health, ill-humor, and
ill-conditionedness of every sort, which are sometimes only a
misfortune, caused by an unhappy natural temperament, but oftener arise
from pure egotism, of which there was not an atom in Helen Cardross.
Her life was like the life of a flower--as natural, unconscious,
fresh, and sweet: she took in every influence about her, and gave out
freely all she had to give; desired no better things than she possessed,
and where she was planted there she grew.

It was not wonderful that the little earl loved her, and that under her
sunshiny soul his life too blossomed out as it might never otherwise
have done, but have drooped and faded, and gone back into the darkness,
imperfect and unfulfilled; for, though each human life is, in a sense,
complete to itself, and must work itself out independently, clinging to
no other, still there is a great and beautiful mystery in the way one
life seems to influence an other, sometimes for ill, but far, far
oftener for good.

Lord Cairnforth was not much with the Cardross boys. He liked them, and
evidently craved after their company, but they were very shy of him.
Sometimes they let Malcolm bring him into their boat, and condescended
to row him up and down the loch, a mode of locomotion in which he
greatly delighted, for, at best, the shaking of the great lumbering
coach was not easy to him, and he always begged to be carried in
Malcolm's arms till he found how pleasantly he could lie in the stern of
the Manse boat, and float about on the smooth water, watching the
mountains and the shores.

True, he could not stir an inch from where he was laid down, but he lay
there so contentedly, enjoying everything, and really looked, what he
often said he was, "as happy as a king."

And by degrees, with a little home persuasion from Helen, the boys got
reconciled to his company--found, indeed, that he was not such bad
company after all; for often, when they were tired of pulling, and let
the boat drift into some quiet little bay, or rock lazily in the middle
of the loch, the little earl would begin talking--telling stories,
which soon caught the attention of the minister's boys. These were
either fragments out of the books he had read, which seemed countless to
the young Cardrosses, or, what they liked still better, tales "out of
his own head;" and these tales were alwa