o kiss softly the kind face which
always smiled down upon him with a sort of "superior love"--what the
child's childish notion of his friend was no one could of course
discover. But it must have been a mingling of awe and affectionateness;
for he would often--even before he could walk--crawl up to the
little chair, steady himself by it, and then look into Lord Cairnforth's
face with those mysterious baby eyes, full of questioning, but yet
without the slightest fear. And once, when his mother was teaching him
his first hymn--

"Gentle Jesus, meek and mild,
Look upon a little child,"

Boy startled her by the sudden remark--one of the divine profanities
that are often falling from the innocent lips of little children--

"I know Jesus. He is the earl."

And then Helen tried, in some simple way, to make the child understand
about Lord Cairnforth, and how he had been all his life so heavily
afflicted; but Boy could not comprehend it as affliction at all. There
seemed to him something not inferior, but superior to all other people
in that motionless figure, with its calm sweet face--who was never
troubled, never displeased--whom every body delighted to obey, and at
whose feet lay treasures untold.

"I think Boy likes me," Lord Cairnforth would say, when he met the
upturned beaming face as the child, in an ecstasy of expectation, ran to
meet him. "His love may last as long as the playthings do."

But the earl was mistaken, as Helen knew. His love-victory had been in
something deeper than toys and "goodies." Even when their charm began
to cease Boy still crept up to the little chair, and looked from the
empty footboard up to the loving face, which no one, man, woman, or
child, ever regarded without something far higher than pity.

And, by degrees, Boy, or "Carr"--which, as being the diminutive for
his second Christian name, Cardross, he was often called now--found a
new attraction in his friend. He would listen with wide-open eyes, and
attention that never flagged, to the interminable "tories" which the
earl told him, out of the same brilliant imagination which had once used
to delight his uncles in the boat. And so, little by little, the child
and the man grew to be "a pair of friends"--familiar and fond, but
with a certain tender reverence always between them, which had the most
salutary effect on the younger.

Whenever he was sick, or sorry, or naughty--and Master "Boy" could
be exceedingly naughty sometim