shall be bound in no
way externally; let all go on as heretofore. I will have it so."

And of all Lord Cairnforth's generosity she would accept of nothing for
herself except a small annual sum, which, with her widow's pension from
the East India Company, sufficed to make her independent of her father;
but she did not refuse kindness to her boy.

Never was there such a boy. "Boy" he was called from the first, never
"baby;" there was nothing of the baby about him. Before he was a year
old he ruled his mother, grandfather, and Uncle Duncan with a rod of
iron. Nay, the whole village were his slaves. "Miss Helen's bairn" was
a little king every where. It might have gone rather hard for the poor
wee fellow thus allegorically

"Wearing on his baby brow the round
And top of sovereignty"

That dangerous sovereignty--any human being--to wield, had there
not been at least one person who was able to assume authority over him.

This was, strange to say--and yet not strange--the Earl of
Cairnforth.

From his earliest babyhood Boy had been accustomed to the sight of the
sight of the motionless figure in the moving chair, who never touched
him, but always spoke so kindly and looked around so smilingly; whom, he
could perceive--for children are quicker to notice things than we
some times think--his mother and grandfather invariably welcomed with
such exceeding pleasure, and treated with never-failing respect and
tenderness. And, as soon as he could crawl, the footboard of the
mysterious wheeled chair became to the little man a perfect
treasure-house of delight. Hidden there he found toys, picture-books,
"sweeties"--such as he got nowhere else, and for which, before
appropriating them, he was carefully taught to express thanks in his own
infantile way, and made to understand fully from whom they came.

"It's bribery, and against my principles," the earl would say, half
sadly. "But, if I did not give him things, how else could Boy learn to
love me?"

Helen never answered this, no more than she used answer many similar
speeches in the earl's childhood. She knew time would prove them all to
be wrong.

What sort of idea the child really had of this wonderful donor, the
source of most of his pleasures, who yet was so different externally
from every body else; who never moved from the wheel-chair; who neither
caressed him nor played with him, and whom he was not allowed to play
with, but only lifted up sometimes t