'No, I am not; I am in no mood for compliments. I know very well what stuff you are made of. I know your superiority to myself. I know you will be selected to go up over all our heads. I feel all this; and Alaric, you must not be surprised that, to a certain degree, it is painful to me to feel it. But, by God's help I will get over it; and if you succeed it shall go hard with me, but I will teach myself to rejoice at it. Look at that fawn there,' said he, turning away his face to hide the tear in his eye, 'did you ever see more perfect motion?' Alaric was touched; but there was more triumph than sympathy in his heart. It was sweet, much too sweet, to him to hear his superiority thus acknowledged. He was superior to the men who worked round him in his office. He was made of a more plastic clay than they, and despite the inferiority of his education, he knew himself to be fit for higher work than they could do. As the acknowledgement was made to him by the man whom, of those around him, he certainly ranked second to himself, he could not but feel that his heart's blood ran warm within him, he could not but tread with an elastic step. But it behoved him to answer Harry, and to answer him in other spirit than this. 'Oh, Harry,' said he, 'you have some plot to ruin me by my own conceit; to make me blow myself out and destroy myself, poor frog that I am, in trying to loom as largely as that great cow, Fidus Neverbend. You know I am fully conscious how much inferior my education has been to yours.' 'Education is nothing,' said Harry. Education is nothing! Alaric triumphantly re-echoed the words in his heart--'Education is nothing--mind, mind is everything; mind and the will.' So he expressed himself to his own inner self; but out loud he spoke much more courteously. 'It is the innate modesty of your own heart, Harry, that makes you think so highly of me and so meanly of yourself. But the proof of what we each can do is yet to be seen. Years alone can decide that. That your career will be honourable and happy, of that I feel fully sure! I wish I were as confident of mine.' 'But, Alaric,' said Norman, going on rather with the thread of his own thoughts, than answering or intending to answer what the other said, 'in following up your high ambition--and I know you have a high ambition--do not allow yourself to believe that the end justifies the means, because you see that men around you act as though they believed so.' 'Do I do so--do I seem to do so?' said Alaric, turning sharply round. 'Don't be angry with me, Alaric; don't think that I want to preach; but sometimes I fancy, not that you do so, but that your mind is turning that way; that in your eager desire for honourable success you won't scrutinize the steps you will have to take.' 'That I would get to the top of the hill, in short, even though the hillside be miry. Well, I own I wish to get to the top of the hill.' 'But not to defile yourself in doing so.'