Mildmay blushed too. He was young enough to be very sensitive to ridicule, and to know that high ideals should not be rashly spoken of except to sympathetic souls. "Why not," he said, "for them as well as for others?" then stopped between disappointment and offence. "Ah!" said Cicely, "you don't know the village people. If you spoke to them of high ideals, they would only open their mouths and stare. If it was something to make a little money by, poor souls! or to get new boots for their children, or even to fatten the pigs. Now you are disgusted, Mr. Mildmay; but you don't know how poor the people are, and how little time they have for anything but just what is indispensable for living." As she said this, Cicely's eyes grew wistful, and filled with moisture. The young man thought it was an angelical pity for the poverty and sufferings of others; but I fear the girl was at that moment thinking of what lay before herself. "Miss St. John," he said, "when you feel for them so deeply, you must sympathize with me too. The harder life is, has it not the more need of some clear perception of all the higher meanings in it? If it is worth while to be a clergyman at all, this is the use, it seems to me, to which we should put ourselves; and for that reason----" "You are coming to Brentburn!" cried Cicely. The tears disappeared from her eyes, dried by the flush of girlish impatience and indignation that followed. "As if they were all heathens; as if no one else had ever taught them--and spent his time and strength for them! Out of your Latin and Greek, and your philosophy, and your art, and all those fine things, you are coming to set a high ideal before poor Sally Gillows, whose husband beats her, and the Hodges, with their hundreds of children, and the hard farmers and the hard shopkeepers that grind the others to the ground. Well!" she said, coming rapidly down from this indignant height to a half disdainful calm, "I hope you will find it answer, Mr. Mildmay. Perhaps it will do better than papa's system. He has only told them to try and do their best, poor souls! to put up with their troubles as well as they could, and to hope that some time or other God would send them something better either in this world or another. I don't think papa's way has been very successful, after all," said Cicely, with a faint laugh; "perhaps yours may be the best." "I think you do me injustice," said Mildmay, feeling the attack so unprovoked that he could afford to be magnanimous. "I have never thought of setting up my way in opposition to Mr. St. John's way. Pray do not think so. Indeed, I did not know, and could not think----" "Of papa at all!" cried Cicely, interrupting him as usual. "Why should you? No, no, it was not you who ought to have thought of him. You never heard his name before, I suppose. No one could expect it of you." "And if I have entered into this question," he continued, "it was to show you that I had not at least mere petty personal motives."