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.