He knew well that her life--her free open, happy life, was not like his life, and never could be.

She had yet to learn that bitter but salutary self-restraint, which, if it has to suffer, often for others' sake as well as for its own, prefers to suffer alone.
But Lord Cairnforth had learned this to the full.

Otherwise, as he sat in the Manse parlor, listening patiently to Helen's father, and in the newness and suddenness of her loss, and the strong delusion of his own fond fancy, imagining every minute he heard her step on the stair and her voice in the hall, he must have utterly broken down.
He did not do so.

He maintained his righteous concealment, his noble deceit--to the very last; spending the whole evening with Mr.
Cardross, and quitting him without having betrayed a word of what he dreaded--what he was almost sure of.
Though the marriage might be, and no doubt was, a perfectly legal and creditable marriage in the eye of the world, still, in the eyes of honest men, it would be deemed altogether unworthy and unfortunate, and he knew the minister would think it so.

How could he tell the poor old father, who had so generously given up his only daughter for the one simple reason--sufficient reason for any righteous marriage-- "Helen loved him," that his new son-in-law was proved by proof irresistible to be a deliberate liar, a selfish, scheming, mercenary knave?
So, under this heavy responsibility, Lord Cairnforth decided to do what, in minor matters, he had often noticed Helen do toward her gentle and easily-wounded father--to lay upon him no burdens greater than he could bear, but to bear them herself for him.