Helen's position, as heiress presumptive, was regarded as merely nominal; it was her son, the fine young fellow whom every body knew from his babyhood, toward whom the loyalty of the little community blazed up in a height of feudal devotion that was touching to see.

The warm Scotch heart--all the warmer, perhaps, for a certain narrowness and clannishness, which in its pride would probably, nay, certainly, have shut itself up against a stranger or an inferior--opened freely to "Miss Helen's" son and the minister's grandson, a young man known to all and approved of by all.
So the festivity was planned to be just the earl's coming of age over again, with the difference between June and December, which removed the feasting-place from the lawn to the great kitchen of the Castle, and caused bonfires on the hill-tops to be a very doubtful mode of jubilation.

The old folk--young then--who remembered the bright summer festival of twenty-four years ago told many a tale of that day, and how the "puir wee earl" came forward in his little chair and made his brief speech, every word and every promise of which his after life had so faithfully fulfilled.
"The heir's a wise-like lad, and a braw lad," said the old folks of the clachan, patronizingly.

"He's no that ill the noo, and he'll aiblins grow the better, ye ken; but naibody that comes after will be like him.
We'll ne'er see anither Earl o' Cairnforth." The same words which Mr.Menteith and the rest had said when the earl was born, but with what a different meaning! Lord Cairnforth came back among his own people amid a transport of welcome.

Though he had been long away, Mrs.Bruce and other assistants had carried out his plans and orders so successfully that the estate had not suffered for his absence.