over's on his mistress's.

"Indeed so," replied the judge; "very different. And so I fear are you
and he. Yet I would like it very ill if my young friend were to misjudge
his father. He has all the Roman virtues: Cato and Brutus were such; I
think a son's heart might well be proud of such an ancestry of one."

"And I would sooner he were a plaided herd," cried Archie, with sudden
bitterness.

"And that is neither very wise, nor I believe entirely true," returned
Glenalmond. "Before you are done you will find some of these expressions
rise on you like a remorse. They are merely literary and decorative;
they do not aptly express your thought, nor is your thought clearly
apprehended, and no doubt your father (if he were here) would say,
'Signor Feedle-eerie!'"

With the infinitely delicate sense of youth, Archie avoided the subject
from that hour. It was perhaps a pity. Had he but talked--talked
freely--let himself gush out in words (the way youth loves to do, and
should), there might have been no tale to write upon the Weirs of
Hermiston. But the shadow of a threat of ridicule sufficed; in the
slight tartness of these words he read a prohibition; and it is likely
that Glenalmond meant it so.

Besides the veteran, the boy was without confidant or friend. Serious
and eager, he came through school and college, and moved among a crowd
of the indifferent, in the seclusion of his shyness. He grew up
handsome, with an open, speaking countenance, with graceful, youthful
ways; he was clever, he took prizes, he shone in the Speculative
Society. It should seem he must become the centre of a crowd of friends;
but something that was in part the delicacy of his mother, in part the
austerity of his father, held him aloof from all. It is a fact, and a
strange one, that among his contemporaries Hermiston's son was thought
to be a chip of the old block. "You're a friend of Archie Weir's?" said
one to Frank Innes; and Innes replied, with his usual flippancy and more
than his usual insight: "I know Weir, but I never met Archie." No one
had met Archie, a malady most incident to only sons. He flew his private
signal, and none heeded it; it seemed he was abroad in a world from
which the very hope of intimacy was banished; and he looked round about
him on the concourse of his fellow-students, and forward to the trivial
days and acquaintances that were to come, without hope or interest.

As time went on, the tough and rough old sinner felt