"This is mere madness!" cried Mr. Ascott, paling a little in his ruddy complexion. Mildmay made a rush at the window as she spoke, feeling the situation intolerable. When she appealed to him thus by name, he turned round suddenly, his heart so swelling within him that he scarcely knew what he was doing. It was not for him to object or to remonstrate as the other could do. He went up to her, scarcely seeing her, and grasped for a moment her nervous interlaced hands. "Miss St. John," he cried, in a broken voice, "whatever you want that I can get you, you shall have--that, if it must be so, or anything else," and so rushed out of the room and out of the house, passing Mab in the hall without seeing her. His excitement was so great that he rushed straight on, into the heart of the pine-woods a mile off, before he came to himself. Well! this, then, was the life he had been wondering over from his safe retirement. He found it not in anything great or visible to the eye of the world, not in anything he could put himself into, or share the advantages of. He, well off, rich indeed, strong, with a man's power of work, and so many kinds of highly-paid, highly-esteemed work open to him, must stand aside and look on, and see this slight girl, nineteen years old, with not a tittle of his education or his strength, and not two-thirds of his years, put herself into harness, and take up the lowly work which would sink her in social estimation, and, with all superficial persons, take away from her her rank as gentlewoman. The situation, so far as Cicely St. John was concerned, was not remarkable one way or another, except in so much as she had chosen to be village schoolmistress instead of governess in a private family. But to Mildmay it was as a revelation. He could do nothing except get her the place, as he had promised to do. He could not say, Take part of my income; I have more than I know what to do with, though that was true enough. He could do nothing for her, absolutely nothing. She must bear her burden as she could upon her young shrinking shoulders; nay, not shrinking--when he remembered Cicely's look, he felt something come into his throat. People had stood at the stake so, he supposed, head erect, eyes smiling, a beautiful disdain of the world they thus defied and confronted in their shining countenances. But again he stopped himself; Cicely was not defiant, not contemptuous, took upon her no _rôle_ of martyr. If she smiled, it was at the folly of those who supposed she would break down, or give in, or fail of courage for her work; but nothing more. She was, on the contrary, nervous about his consent and Ascott's to give her the work she wanted, and hesitated about her own powers and the recommendation of the Miss Blandys; and no one--not he, at least, though he had more than he wanted--could do anything! If Cicely had been a lad of nineteen, instead of a girl, something might have been possible, but nothing was possible now.