oral condition of the man who seeks freedom through refusal to act at
the will of another. He who does so will come by degrees to have no
will of his own, and act only from impulse--which may be the will of a
devil. So Donal and Davie grew together into one heart of friendship.
Donal never longed for his hours with Davie to pass, and Davie was
never so happy as when with Donal. The one was gently leading the other
into the paths of liberty. Nothing but the teaching of him who made the
human soul can make that soul free, but it is in great measure through
those who have already learned that he teaches; and Davie was an apt
pupil, promising to need less of the discipline of failure and pain
that he was strong to believe, and ready to obey.

But Donal was not all the day with Davie, and latterly had begun to
feel a little anxious about the time the boy spent away from
him--partly with his brother, partly with the people about the stable,
and partly with his father, who evidently found the presence of his
younger son less irksome to him than that of any other person, and saw
more of him than of Forgue: the amount of loneliness the earl could
endure was amazing. But after what he had seen and heard, Donal was
most anxious concerning his time with his father, only he felt it a
delicate thing to ask him about it. At length, however, Davie himself
opened up the matter.

"Mr. Grant," he said one day, "I wish you could hear the grand
fairy-stories my papa tells!"

"I wish I might!" answered Donal.

"I will ask him to let you come and hear. I have told him you can make
fairy-tales too; only he has quite another way of doing it;--and I must
confess," added Davie a little pompously, "I do not follow him so
easily as you.--Besides," he added, "I never can find anything in what
you call the cupboard behind the curtain of the story. I wonder
sometimes if his stories have any cupboard!--I will ask him to-day to
let you come."

"I think that would hardly do," said Donal. "Your father likes to tell
his boy fairy-tales, but he might not care to tell them to a man. You
must remember, too, that though I have been in the house what you think
a long time, your father has seen very little of me, and might feel me
in the way: invalids do not generally enjoy the company of strangers.
You had better not ask him."

"But I have often told him how good you are, Mr. Grant, and how you
can't bear anything that is not right, and I am sure he must