"Will you do so, really?" she said, the tears starting to her eyes. "O Mr. Mildmay, perhaps I am wrong! Papa would not advise you so. He would say he never asked for anything in his life, and that he would not be a beggar for a living now. And think--perhaps I should not have said half so much if I could have done anything. I am too ignorant and too inexperienced for any one to be guided by me." "Yes, you are ignorant," cried the young man. "You don't know the sophistries with which we blind ourselves and each other. You dare to think what is right and what is wrong--and, for once in my life, so shall I." The moisture that had been gathering dropped all at once in two great unexpected tears out of Cicely's eyes. Her face lighted like the sky when the sun rises, a rosy suffusion as of dawn came over her. Her emotion was so increased by surprise that even now she did not know what to think. In the least likely quarter all at once, in her moment of need, she had found sympathy and succour; and I think perhaps that even the most strong and self-sustaining do not know how much they have wanted sympathy and comprehension until it comes. It made Cicely weak, not strong. She felt that she could have sat down on the roadside and cried. She had an idiotic impulse to tell him everything, and especially about the butcher--how kind he had been. These impulses passed through her mind mechanically, or, as one ought to say nowadays, automatically; but Cicely, who had no notion of being an automaton, crushed them in the bud. And what she really would have said in the tumult of her feelings, beyond what the look in her eyes said, behind the tears, I cannot tell, if it had not been that the curate came forth leisurely at that moment from the rectory, making it necessary that tears and every other evidence of emotion should be cleared away. "Cicely, it is just time for dinner," he said. "You should not walk, my dear, in the heat of the day; and Mr. Mildmay, too, must be tired, and want something to refresh him. It is a long time since breakfast," said the gentle curate, opening the door that his guest might precede him. Mr. St. John was not a great eater, but he had a mild, regular appetite, and did not like any disrespect to the dinner hour. CHAPTER XIV. HOW TO EXERCISE CHURCH PATRONAGE.