"But now she is determined to make the strongest effort to be with us at the New Year. Read her letter—it came yesterday; a week later than usual. I should have sent it up to the Castle, for it troubled me a little, especially the postscript; can you make it out? part of it is under the seal. It is in answer to what I told her of Duncan; he was always her pet, you know. How she used to carry him about the garden, even when he grew quite a big boy! Poor Helen!"
While the minister went on talking, feebly and wanderingly, in a way that at another time would have struck the earl as something new and rather alarming, Lord Cairnforth eagerly read the letter. It ended thus:
"Tell Dunnie I am awfully glad he is to be a minister. I hope all my brothers will settle down in dear old Scotland, work hard, and pay their way like honest men. And bid them, as soon as ever they can, to marry honest women—good, loving Scotch lassies—no fremd (archaic: strange, foreign) folk. Tell them never to fear for 'poortith cauld,' as Mr. Burns wrote about; it's easy to bear, when it's honest poverty. I would rather see my five brothers living on porridge and milk— wives, and weans, and all—than see them like these foreigners, counts, barons, and princes though they be. Father, I hate them all. And I mind always the way I was brought up, and that I was once a minister's daughter in dear and bonnie Cairnforth."
"What can she mean by that?" said Mr. Cardross, watching anxiously the earl's countenance as he read.
I suppose, what Helen always means, exactly what she says."
"That is true. You know we used always to say Helen could hold her tongue, though it wasn't easy to her, the dear lassie; but she could not say what was not the fact, nor even give the impression of it. Therefore, if she were unhappy, she would have told me?"
This was meant as a question, but it gained no answer.
"Surely," entreated the father, anxiously, "surely you do not think the lassie is unhappy?"
"This is not a very happy world," said the earl, sadly. "But I do believe that if any thing had been seriously wrong with her Helen would have told us."
He spoke his real belief. But he did not speak of a dread far deeper, which had sometimes occurred to him, but which that sad and even bitter postscript now removed, that circumstances could change character, and that Helen Cardross and Helen Bruce were two different women.