opportunely, my lord had his carriage, and drove the child himself to Hermiston, the customary place of convalescence.  It is conceivable he had been more than usually anxious, for that journey always remained in Archie’s memory as a thing apart, his father having related to him from beginning to end, and with much detail, three authentic murder cases.  Archie went the usual round of other Edinburgh boys, the high school and the college; and Hermiston looked on, or rather looked away, with scarce an affectation of interest in his progress.  Daily, indeed, upon a signal after dinner, he was brought in, given nuts and a glass of port, regarded sardonically, sarcastically questioned.  “Well, sir, and what have you donn with your book to-day?” my lord might begin, and set him posers in law Latin.  To a child just stumbling into Corderius, Papinian and Paul proved quite invincible.  But papa had memory of no other.  He was not harsh to the little scholar, having a vast fund of patience learned upon the bench, and was at no pains whether to conceal or to express his disappointment.  “Well, ye have a long jaunt before ye yet!” he might observe, yawning, and fall back on his own thoughts (as like as not) until the time came for separation, and my lord would take the decanter and the glass, and be off to the back chamber looking on the Meadows, where he toiled on his cases till the hours were small.  There was no “fuller man” on the bench; his memory was marvellous, though wholly legal; if he had to “advise” extempore, none did it better; yet there was none who more earnestly prepared.  As he thus watched in the night, or sat at table and forgot the presence of his son, no doubt but he tasted deeply of recondite pleasures.  To be wholly devoted to some intellectual exercise is to have succeeded in life; and perhaps only in law and the higher mathematics may this devotion be maintained, suffice to itself without reaction, and find continual rewards without excitement.  This atmosphere of his father’s sterling industry was the best of Archie’s education.  Assuredly it did not attract him; assuredly it rather rebutted and depressed.  Yet it was still present, unobserved like the ticking of a clock, an arid ideal, a tasteless stimulant in the boy’s life.

But Hermiston was not all of one piece.  He was, besides, a mighty toper; he could sit at wine until the day dawned, and pass directly from the table to the bench with a steady hand and a clear head.  Beyond the third bottle, he showed the plebeian in a larger print; the low, gross accent, the low, foul mirth, grew broader and commoner; he became less formidable, and infinitely more disgusting.  Now, the boy had inherited from Jean Rutherford a shivering delicacy, unequally mated with potential violence.  In the playing-fields, and amongst his own companions, he repaid a coarse expression with a blow; at his father’s table (when the time came for him to join these revels) he turned pale and sickened in silence. Of all the guests whom he there encountered, he had toleration for only one: David Keith Carnegie, Lord Glenalmond.  Lord Glenalmond was tall and emaciated, with long features and long delicate hands.  He was often compared with the statue of Forbes of Culloden in the Parliament House; and his blue eye, at more than sixty, preserved some of the fire of youth.  His exquisite disparity with any of his fellow-guests, his appearance as of an artist and an aristocrat stranded in rude company, riveted the boy’s attention; and as curiosity and interest are the things in the world that are the most immediately and certainly rewarded, Lord Glenalmond was attracted by the boy.

“And so this is your son, Hermiston?” he asked, laying his hand on Archie’s shoulder.  “He’s getting a big lad.”

“Hout!” said the gracious father, “just his mother over again—daurna say boo to a goose!”

But the stranger retained the boy, talked to him, drew him out, found in him a taste for letters, and a fine, ardent, modest, youthful soul; and encouraged him to be a visitor on Sunday evenings in his bare, cold, lonely dining-room, where he sat and read in the isolation of a bachelor grown old in refinement.  The beautiful gentleness and grace of the old judge, and the delicacy of his person, thoughts, and language, spoke to Archie’s heart in its own tongue.  He conceived the ambition to be such another; and, when the day came for him to choose a profession, it was in emulation of Lord Glenalmond, not of Lord Hermiston, that he chose the Bar.  Hermiston looked on at this friendship with some secret pride, but openly with the intolerance of scorn.  He scarce lost an opportunity to put them down with a rough jape; and, to say truth, it was not difficult, for they were neither of them quick.  He had a word of contempt for the whole crowd of poets, painters, fiddlers, and their admirers, the bastard race of amateurs, which was continually on his lips.  “Signor Feedle-eerie!” he would say.  “O, for Goad’s sake, no more of the Signor!”

“You and my father are great friends, are you not?” asked Archie once.

“There is no man that I more respect, Archie,” replied Lord Glenalmond.  “He is two things of price.  He is a great lawyer, and he is upright as the day.”

“You and he are so different,” said the boy, his eyes dwelling on those of his old friend, like a lover’s on his mistress’s.

“Indeed so,” replied the judge; “very different.  And so I fear are you and he.  Yet I would like it very ill if my young friend were to misjudge his father.  He has all the Roman virtues: Cato and Brutus were such; I think a son’s heart might well be proud of such an ancestry of one.”

“And I would sooner he were a plaided herd,” cried Archie, with sudden bitterness.

“And that is neither very wise, nor I believe entirely true,” returned Glenalmond.  “Before you are done you will find some of these expressions rise on you like a remorse.  They are merely literary and decorative; they do not aptly express your thought, nor is your thought clearly apprehended, and no doubt your father (if he were here) would say, ‘Signor Feedle-eerie!’”

With the infinitely delicate sense of youth, Archie avoided the subject from that hour.  It was perhaps a pity.  Had he but talked—talked freely—let himself gush out in words (the way youth loves to do and should), there might have been no tale to write upon the Weirs of Hermiston.  But the shadow of a threat of ridicule sufficed; in the slight tartness of these words he read a prohibition; and it is likely that Glenalmond meant it so.

Besides the veteran, the boy was without confidant or friend.  Serious and eager, he came through school and college, and moved among a crowd of the indifferent, in the seclusion of his shyness.  He grew up handsome, with an open, speaking countenance, with graceful, youthful ways; he was clever, he took prizes, he shone in the Speculative Society.  It should seem he must become the centre of a crowd of friends; but something that was in part the delicacy of his mother, in part the austerity of his father, held him aloof from all.  It is a fact, and a strange one, that among his contemporaries Hermiston’s son was thought to be a chip of the old block.  “You’re a friend of Archie Weir’s?” said one to Frank Innes; and Innes replied, with his usual flippancy and more than his usual insight: “I know Weir, but I never met Archie.”  No one had met Archie, a malady most incident to only sons.  He flew his private signal, and none heeded it; it seemed he was abroad in a world from which the very hope of intimacy was banished; and he looked round about him on the concourse of his fellow-students, and forward to the trivial days and acquaintances that were to come, without hope or interest.

As time went on, the tough and rough old sinner felt himself drawn to the son of his loins and sole continuator of his new family, with softnesses of sentiment