home, I think we
ought to have a little talk upon some few matters which we have never
referred to as yet. Are you able for this?"

"Oh yes, but--I can't--I can't!" and a sudden expression of
trouble and fear darkened the widow's face. "Do not ask me any
questions about the past. It is all over now; it seems like a dream--
as if I had never been away from Cairnforth."

"Let it be so then, Helen, my dear," replied the earl, tenderly.
"Indeed, I never meant otherwise. It is far the best."

Thus, both at the time and ever after, he laid, and compelled others to
lay, the seal of silence upon those two sad years, the secrets of which
were buried in Captain Bruce's quiet grave in Grayfriars' church-yard.

"Helen," he continued, "I am not going to ask you a single question; I
am only going to tell you a few things, which you are to tell your
father at the first opportunity, so as to place you in a right position
toward him, and whatever his health may be, to relieve his mind entirely
both as to you and Boy."

"Boy" the little Alexander had already begun to be called. "Boy" par
excellence, for even at that early period of his existence he gave
tokens of being a most masculine character, with a resolute will of his
own, and a power of howling till he got his will which delighted Nurse
Campbell exceedingly. He was already a thorough Cardross--not in the
least a Bruce; he inherited Helen's great blue eyes, large frame, and
healthy temperament, and was, in short, that repetition of the mother in
the son which Dame Nature delights in, and out of which she sometimes
makes the finest and noblest men that the world ever sees.

"Boy has been wide awake these two hours, noticing every thing," said
his mother, with a mother's firm conviction that this rather imaginative
fact was the most interesting possible to every body. "He might have
known the loch quite well already, by the way he kept staring at it."

"He will know it well enough by-and by," said the earl, smiling. "You
are aware, Helen, that he and you are permanently coming home."

"To the Manse? yes! My dear father! he will keep us there during his
life time. Afterward we must take our chance, my boy and I."

"Not quite that. Are you not aware--I thought, from circumstances,
you must have guessed it long ago--that Cairnforth Castle, and my
whole property, will be yours sometime?"

"I will tell you no untruth, Lord Cairnforth. I was aware of it. That
is,