“There is little praise to be got from men for that,” said Wingfold; “and I am sure Richard does not seek any. He would help men to see that the man who serves his neighbour, is the man whom the Lord of the universe honours. An idle man, or one busy only for himself, is like a lump of refuse floating this way and that in the flux and reflux of the sewer-tide of the world. Were Richard lord of lands it would be absurd of him to give his life to bookbinding; that would be to desert his neighbour on those lands; but what better can he do now than follow the trade by which he may at once earn his living? To omit the question of possibility,--suppose he read for the bar, would that bring him closer to humanity? Would it be a diviner mode of life? Is it a more honourable thing to win a cause--perhaps for the wrong man--than to preserve an old and valuable book? Will a man rank higher in the kingdom that shall not end, because he has again and again rendered unrighteousness triumphant? Would Richard's mind be as free in chambers as in the workshop to search into truth, or as keen to suspect its covert? Would he sit closer to the well-springs of thought and aspiration in a barrister's library, than among the books by which he wins his bread?” With eternity before them, and God at the head and the heart of the universe, Richard and Barbara did not believe in separation any more than in death. He in London and she at Wylder Hall, they were far more together than most unparted pairs. Wingfold set himself to keep Barbara busy, giving her plenty to read and plenty of work: her waiting should be no loss of time to her if he could help it! Among other things, he set her to teach his boy where she thought herself much too ignorant: he held, not only that to teach is the best way to learn, but that the imperfect are the best teachers of the imperfect. He thought this must be why the Lord seems to regard with so much indifference the many falsehoods uttered of and for him. When a man, he said, agonized to get into other hearts the thing dear to his own, the false intellectual or even moral forms in which his ignorance and the crudity of his understanding compelled him to embody it, would not render its truth of none effect, but might, on the contrary, make its reception possible where a truer presentation would stick fast in the door-way. He made Richard promise to take no important step for a year without first letting him know. He was anxious he should have nothing to undo because of what the packet committed to his care might contain. CHAPTER LXV. _THE PACKET_.