the other world.

Not until he was gone did they recognize how much they missed him: in
the Manse parlor where "the earl's chair" took its regular place--in
the pretty Manse garden, where its wheels had made in the gravel walks
deep marks which Helen could not bear to have erased--in his pew at
the kirk, where the minister had learned to look Sunday after Sunday for
that earnest, listening face. Mr. Cardross, too, found it dull no
longer to have his walk up to the Castle, and his hour or two's rest in
the yet unfinished library, which he and Lord Cairnforth had already
begun to consult about, and where the earl was always to be found,
sitting at his little table with his books about him, and Malcolm
lurking within call, or else placed contentedly by the French window,
looking out upon that blaze of beauty into which the countess's
flower-garden had grown. How little they had thought--the young
father and mother, cut off in the midst of their plans, that their poor
child would one day so keenly enjoy them all, and have such sore need
for these or any other simple and innocent enjoyments.

"Papa, how we do miss him!" said Helen one day as she walked with her
father through the Cairnforth woods. "Who would have thought it when he
first came here only a few years ago?"

"Who would indeed?" said the minister, remembering a certain walk he had
taken through these very paths nineteen years before, when he had
wondered why providence had sent the poor babe into the world at all,
and thought how far, far happier it would have been lying dead on its
dead mother's bosom--that beautiful young mother, whose placid face
upon the white satin pillows of her coffin Mr. Cardross yet vividly
recalled; for he saw it often reflected in the living face of the son,