They looked at him, and he was still breathing; they looked at him a few minutes after, and he was, as Mr.Cardross would have expressed it, "away"-- far, far away--in His safe keeping with whom abide the souls of both the righteous and the wicked, the living and the dead.
Let Him judge him, for no one else ever did.

No one ever spoke of him but as their dead can only be spoken of either to or by the widow and the fatherless.
Without much difficulty--for, after her husband's death, Helen's strength suddenly collapsed, and she became perfectly passive in the earl's hands and in those of Mrs.Campbell--Lord Cairnforth learned all he required about the circumstances of the Bruce family.
They were absolutely penniless.

Helen's boy had been born only a day or two after their arrival at Edinburg.

Her husband's illness increased suddenly at the last, but he had not been quite incapacitated till she had gained a little strength, so as to be able to nurse him.

But how she had done it--how then and for many months past she had contrived to keep body and soul together, to endure fatigue, privation, mental anguish, and physical weakness, was, according to good Mrs.Campbell, who heard and guessed a great deal more than she chose to tell, "just wonderful'." It could only be accounted for by Helen's natural vigor of constitution, and by that preternatural strength and courage which Nature supplies to even the saddest form of motherhood.
And now her brief term of wifehood--she had yet not been married two years--was over forever, and Helen Bruce was left a mother only.