I am older than you are; and you must not be compromised as regards my son.

He is a good boy now, but temptation is strong, and," with an irrepressible shudder, "appearances are deceitful sometimes.
Wait, as I have always said--wait till you see what sort of man Cardross turns out to be." Lord Cairnforth made no reply, and once more the two friends sat watching the unconscious youth, who had been for so many years the one object of both their lives.
"Ignorance is not innocence," said the earl at length, after along fit of musing.

"If you bind a creature mortally hand and foot, how can it ever learn to walk?
It would, as soon as you loosed the bonds, find itself not free, but paralyzed--as helpless a creature as myself." Helen turned away from watching her boy, and laid her hand tenderly, in her customary caress, on the feeble hand, which yet had been the means of accomplishing so much.
"You should not speak so," she said.

"Scarcely ever is there a more useful life than yours." "More useful, certainly, than any one once expected--except you, Helen.

I have tried to make you not ashamed of me these thirty years." "Is it so many?
Thirty years since the day you first came to the Manse ?" "Yes; you know I was forty last birthday.