“And what is it the better?” said John; “the same evils reappear just in the same way--the same wickedness, and profanity, and indifference. For all the change one can see, mother dear, all your work and fatigue might never have been.” “I must say so far as that goes I don’t agree with you at all, John,” cried his mother, with a certain sharp ring in her voice. The colour came to her cheeks and the water to her eyes. If it had been said to her that her life itself had been a mistake and failure, she could not have felt it more. Indeed the one implied the other; and if there was any one thing that she had built upon in all her modest existence, it was the difference in the parish. John’s words gave her such a shock that she gasped after them with a sense of partial suffocation. And then she did her best to restrain the momentary sharp thrill of resentment; for how could she be angry with her boy? “My dear,” she said, humbly, with the tears in her soft eyes, “I don’t suppose I have done half or quarter what I ought to have done; but still if you had seen the parish when we came---- If I had been a woman of more energy, and cleverer than I am----” “You cannot think it was that I meant,” cried John. “How you mistake me, mother! It is because your work has been so perfect, so unwearied--because it ought to have wrought miracles----” “Oh, no, no, not that,” she said, recovering her tranquillity, and smiling on her boy. “It has been very humble, my dear; but still, if you had seen the parish when we came--the alehouse was more frequented than the church a great deal--the children were not baptised--there were things going on I could not speak of even to you. That very Robert Little that we were speaking of--his father was the most inveterate poacher in the whole country, always in prison or in trouble; the eldest brother went for a soldier, and one of the girls---- Oh, John, Fanshawe Regis is not Paradise, but things are better now.” “My dear little mother! but they are not as good as they ought to be after the work of all your life.” “Don’t speak of me, my dear boy, as if I were everything,” said Mrs Mitford; “think of your papa--and oh, John, think of what is far beyond any of us. Think whose life it was that was given, not for the righteous, but to save sinners; think who it was that said there was joy in heaven over one that repented; and should we grudge a whole lifetime if we could but be sure that one was saved? I hope that is what I shall never, never, do.”