on, which Helen did not communicate to any
body, nor referred to again with Lord Cairnforth, though she pondered
over it and him continually.

A week after this, Mr. Menteith unexpectedly appeared at the Castle, and
after a long consultation with Mr. Cardross, it was agreed that what
seemed the evident wish of the earl should be accomplished if possible;
that he, Malcolm, Mrs. Campbell, and Mr. Menteith should start for
London immediately.

Such a journey was then a very different thing from what it is now, and
to so helpless a traveler as Lord Cairnforth its difficulties were
doubled. He had to post the whole distance in his own carriage, which
was fitted up so as to be as easy as possible in locomotion, besides
being so arranged that he could sleep in it if absolutely necessary, for
ordinary beds and ordinary chairs were sometimes very painful to him.
Had he been poor, in all probability he would long ago have died--of
sheer suffering.

Fortunately, it was summer time. He staid at Cairnforth till after his
birthday, "for I may never see another," said he, with that gentle smile
which seemed to imply that he would be neither glad nor sorry, and then
he started. He was quite cheerful himself, but Mr. Menteith and Mrs.
Campbell looked very anxious. Malcolm was full of superstitious
forebodings, and Helen Cardross and her father, when they bade him
good-by and watched the carriage drive slowly from the Castle doors,
felt as sad as if they were parting from him, not for London, but for
the other world.

Not until he was gone did they recognize how much they missed him: in
the Manse parlor where "the earl's chair" took its regular place--in
the pretty Manse garden, where its wheels had made in the gravel walks
deep marks which Helen could not bear to have erased--in his pew at
the kirk, where the minister had learned to look Sunday after Sunday for
that earnest, listening face. Mr. Cardross, too, found it dull no
longer to have his walk up to the Castle, and his hour or two's rest in
the yet unfinished library, which he and Lord Cairnforth had already
begun to consult about, and where the earl was always to be found,
sitting at his little table with his books about him, and Malcolm
lurking within call, or else placed contentedly by the French window,
looking out upon that blaze of beauty into which the countess's
flower-garden had grown. How little they had thought--the young
father and mother, cut off in the mid