n did not speak, "I should like: it would
make me happy if, on his coming of age, he would change his name, or add
mine to it--be Alexander Cardross Bruce Montgomerie, or simply
Alexander Cardross Montgomerie. Which do you prefer?"

Helen meditated long. Many a change came and went over the widow's face
--widowed long enough for time to have softened down all things, and
made her remember only the young days--the days of a girl's first
love. It might have been so, for she said at last, almost with a gasp,

"I wish my son to be Bruce-Montgomerie."

"Be it so."

After that Lord Cairnforth was long silent.

Helen resumed the conversation by asking if he did not think it
dangerous, almost wrong, to tell the boy of this brilliant future
immediately after his errors?

"No, not after errors confessed and forsaken. Remember, it was over
very rags that the prodigal's father put upon him the purple robe. But
our boy is not a prodigal, Helen. I know him well, and I have faith in
him, and faith in human nature--especially Cardross nature." And the
earl smiled. "Far deeper than any harshness will smite him the
consciousness of being forgiven and trusted--of being expected to
carry out in his future life all that was a-missing in two not
particularly happy lives, his mother's--and mine."

Helen Bruce resisted no more. She could not. She was a wise woman--
a generous and loving-hearted woman; still, in that self-contained,
solitary existence, which had been spent close beside her, yet into the
mystery of which she had never penetrated, and never would penetrate,
there was a nearness to heaven and heavenly things, and clearness of
vision about earthly things which went far beyond her own. She could
not quite comprehend it--she would never have thought of it herself
--but she dimly felt that the earl's judgment was correct, and that,
strange as his conduct might appear, he was acting after that large
sense of rightness which implies righteousness; a course of action which
the world so often ridicules and misconstrues, because the point of view
is taken from an altitude not of this world, and the objects regarded
there-from are things not visible, but invisible.

Cardross appeared next day--not at home, but at the Castle, and was
closeted there for several hours with the earl before he ever saw his
mother. When he did--and it was he who came to her, for she refused
to take one step to go to him--he flung himself on h