"Helen, I have had a happy life, or it seems so, looking back upon it.

Remember, I said this, and let no one ever say the contrary." And in all the houses they visited--farm, cottage, or bothie-- every body noticed how exceedingly happy the earl looked, how cheerfully he spoke, and how full of interest he was in every thing around him.
"His lordship may live to be an auld man yet," said some one to Malcolm, and Malcolm indignantly repudiated the possibility of any thing else.
The minister was left a little lonely during this week of Lord Cairnforth's coming home, but he did not seem to feel it.

He felt nothing very much now except pleasure in the sunshine and the fire, in looking at the outside of his books, now rarely opened, and in watching the bright faces around him.

He was made to understand what a grand festival was to be held at Cairnforth, and the earl took especial pains to arrange that the feeble octogenarian should be brought to the Castle without fatigue, and enabled to appear both at the tenants' feast in the kitchen, and the more formal banquet of friends and neighbors in the hall--the grand old dining-room--which was arranged exactly as it had been on the earl's coming of age.
However, there was a difference.

Then the board was almost empty, now it was quite full.