These, during the last nine years, had gradually grown familiar, first with the little childish form, carried about tenderly in Malcolm's arms, and then with the muffled figure, scarcely less of a child to look at, which Malcolm, and sometimes Miss Cardross, drove about in a pony-chaise.

At the kirk especially, though he was always carefully conveyed in first, and borne out last of all the congregation, his face--his sweet, kind, beautiful face was known to them all, and the children were always taught to doff their bonnets or pull their forelocks to the earl.
Beyond that, nobody knew any thing about him.

His large property, accumulating every year, was entirely under the management of Mr.
Menteith; he himself took no interest in it; and the way by which the former heirs of Cairnforth had used to make themselves popular from boyhood, by going among the tenantry, hunting, shooting, fishing, and boating, was impossible to this earl.

His distant dependents hardly remembered his existence, and he took no heed of theirs, until a few months before he came of age, when one of these slight chances which often determine so much changed the current of affairs.
If was just before the "term." Mr.Menteith had been expected all day, but had not arrived, and the earl had taken a long drive with Helen and her father through the Cairnforth woods, where the wild daffodils were beginning to succeed the fading snowdrops, and the mavises had been heard to sing those few rich notes which belong especially to the twilights of early spring, and earnest of all the richness, and glory, and delight of the year.

The little party seemed to feel it--that soft, dreamy sense of dawning spring, which stirs all the soul, especially in youth, with a vague looking forward to some pleasantness which never comes.