“And is not Mr. Asquith looking out for something better?” said Mary. She was more interested in this question than in any other that could at the moment be presented to her. “Poor fellow! I don’t know that he has anything better to look for,” said the Rector. “He has few friends, and nobody to push him. I should not wonder if he remained a curate all his life.” “Nobody does that nowadays,” said Mrs. Hugh Prescott. “Something always turns up. A poor clergyman, so far as I can see, has just as many chances as one that is well off. He is kind to somebody’s child, or attends somebody’s mother on her deathbed, or something of that sort. There is a special providence for poor curates, I think.” Mary took in all this with quick ears, and asked herself, whether, in reality, a special providence was all that Mr. Asquith had to look to. “There is none other that fighteth for us, but only Thou, O God,” we say in church day by day: but even that pious sentiment seems to convey a veiled opinion that other aid would be desirable: but when it is said of a man that a special providence is wanted for his promotion, that man’s hopes do not, to most of the world, seem particularly well founded. Mary felt with a curious swelling of her heart that she was glad this was the case with Mr. Asquith. She was proud of it, if pride is possible in such a matter. When she tested him by the first great commission which sent men out to preach without even bread in their scrip, much less money in their purse--that test which no one had borne as yet--she felt that at last here was one who could bear it; and this gave Mary a degree of pleasure quite incommensurate with his stay in the parish, or of any possible knowledge he could have of her, or she of him. After all she had nothing at all to do with it; and what were his principles of action, or how he was moved by the absence of all means of advancing himself, she had not the least way of knowing. It might be this that made him what John called dull. Mary could not tell. But she felt in her heart, though she was so ignorant, that the real clergyman for whom she had been looking had appeared at last--the only one who could bear the test which had not succeeded at all with the rest of the curates, nor even Uncle Hugh.