Helen hardly knew what to reply. She guessed so well the current of the earl's thoughts, which were often her own too, as she watched his absent or weary looks, though he tried hard to keep his attention to what Mr. Cardross was reading or discussing. But the distance between twenty and sixty--the life beginning and the life advancing toward its close-- was frequently apparent; also between an active, original mind, requiring humanity for its study, and one whose whole bent was among the dry bones of ancient learning--the difference, in short, between learning and knowledge--the mere student and the man who only uses study as a means to the perfecting of his whole nature, his complete existence as a human being. All this Helen felt with her quick, feminine instinct, but she did not clearly understand it, and she could not reason about it at all. She only answered in a troubled sort of way that she thought every body, somehow or other, might in time find enough to do--to be happy in doing--and she was trying to put her meaning into more connected and intelligible form, when, greatly to her relief, Malcom entered the library. Malcolm, being so necessary and close a personal attendant on the earl, always came and went about his master without any body's noticing him; but now Helen fancied he was making signals to her or to some one. Lord Cairnforth detected them. "Is any thing wrong, Malcolm? Speak out; don't hide things from me. I am not a child now." There was just the slightest touch of sharpness in the gentle voice, and Malcolm did speak out. "I wadna be troubling ye, my lord, but it's just an auld man, Dougal Mc Dougal, frae the head o' Loch Mhor--a puir doited body, wha says he maun hae a bit word wi' your lordship. But I tellt him ye coulna be fashed wi' the like o' him." "That was not civil or right, Malcolm--an old man, too. Where is he?" "Just by the door--eh--and he's coming ben--the ill-mannered loon!" cried Malcolm, angrily, as he interrupted the intruder--a tall, gaunt figure wrapped in a shepherd's plaid, with the bonnet set upon the grizzled head in that sturdy independence--nay, more than independence--rudeness, rough and thorny as his own thistle, which is the characteristic of the Scotch peasant externally, till you get below the surface to the warm, kindly heart. "I'm no ill-mannered, and I'll just gang through the hale house till I find my lord," said the old man, shaking off Malcolm with a strength that his seventy odd years seemed scarcely to have diminished. "I'm wushing ane harm to ony o' ye, but I maun get speech o' my lord. He's no bairn; he'll be ane-and-twenty the thirtieth o' June: I mind the day weel, for the wife was brought to bed o' her last wean the same day as the countess, and our Dougal's a braw callant the noo, ye ken. Gin the earl has ony wits ava, whilk folk thocht was aye doubtful', he'll hae gotten them by this time. I maun speak wi' himself', unless, as they said, he's no a' there."