Mildred's soft heart was full of compassion for the lonely girl. Polly, who cried herself to sleep every night for the longing for her lost father, often woke to find Mildred sitting beside her bed watching her. 'You were sleeping so restlessly, I thought I would look in on you,' was all she said; but her motherly kiss spoke volumes. 'How good you are to me, Aunt Milly,' Polly would say to her sometimes. 'I am getting to love you more every day; and then your voice is so soft, and you have such nice ways. I think I shall be happy living with you, and seeing my guardian every day; but we don't want Olive and Chrissy, do we?'--for Mildred had described the vicarage and its inhabitants--'It will feel as though we were in a beehive after this quiet little nest,' as she observed once. Mildred smiled, as she always did over Polly's quaint speeches, which were ripe at times with an old-fashioned wisdom, gathered from the stored garner of age. She would ponder over them sometimes in her slow way, when the girl was sleeping her wet-eyed sleep. Would it come to her to regret the quietness of life which she was laying by for ever as a garment that had galled and fretted her?--that life she had inwardly compared to a dead mill-stream, flecked only by the shadow and sunlight of perpetually recurring days? Would there come a time when the burden and heat of the day would oppress her?--when the load of existence would be too heavy to bear, and even this retrospect of faint gray distances would seem fair by contrast? Women who lead contemplative and sedentary lives are overmuch given to this sort of morbid self-questioning. They are for ever examining the spiritual mechanism of their own natures, with the same result as though one took up a feeble and growing plant by the root to judge of its progress. They spend labour for that which is not bread. By and by, out of the vigour of her busy life, Mildred learnt the wholesome sweetness of a motto she ever afterwards cherished as her favourite: _Laborare est orare_. Polly's questions, direct or indirect, sometimes ruffled the elder woman's tranquillity, however gently she might put them by. 'Were you ever a girl, Aunt Milly?--a girl like me, I mean?' And as Mildred bit her lip and coloured slightly at a question that would have galled any woman of eight-and-twenty, she continued, caressingly, 'You are so nice; only just a trifle too solemn. I think, after all, I would rather be Polly than you. You seem to have had no pictures in your life.' 'My dear child, what do you mean?' returned Mildred; but she spoke with a little effort.