When they came out and breathed again the blue, clean, rain-washed air instead of the musty smells of the hall, involuntarily Hester's eyes rose to the vault whose only keystone is the will of the Father, whose endless space alone is large enough to picture the heart of God: how was that old man to get up into the high regions and grow clean and wise? For all the look, he must belong there as well as she! And were there not thousands equally and more miserable in the world--people wrapped in no tenderness, to whom none ministered, left if not driven--so it seemed at the moment to Hester--to fold themselves in their own selfishness? And was there nothing she, a favored one of the family, could do to help, to comfort, to lift up one such of her own flesh and blood?--to rescue a heart from the misery of hopelessness?--to make this one or that feel there was a heart of love and refuge at the centre of things? Hester had a large, though not hitherto entirely active aspiration in her; and now, the moment she began to flutter her weak wings, she found the whole human family hanging upon her, and that she could not rise except in raising them along with her. For the necessities of our deepest nature are such as not to admit of a mere private individual satisfaction. I well remember feeling as a child that I did not care for God to love me if he did not love everybody: the kind of love I needed was love essential to my nature--the love of me, a man, not of me a person--the love therefore that all men needed, the love that belonged to their nature as the children of the Father, a love he could not give me except he gave it to all men. But this was not the beginning of Hester's enthusiasm for her kind--only a crystallizing shock it received. Nor was it likely to be the less powerful in the end that now at the age of three and twenty she had but little to show for it. She was one of the strong ones that grow slowly; and she had now for some years been cherishing an idea, and working for its realization, which every sight and sound of misery tended to quicken and strengthen. "There you are again," said Cornelius--"star-gazing as usual! You'll be spraining your other ankle presently!" "I had forgotten all about my ankle, Corney dear," returned Hester, softened by her sorrowful sympathy; "but I will be careful." "You had better. Well, I think between us we had the worth of our shilling! Did you ever see such a ridiculous old bloke!" "I wish you would not use that word, Corney," said Hester, letting her displeasure fall on the word, where she knew the feeling was entrenched beyond assault. "What's the matter with the word? It is the most respectable old Anglo-Saxon." Hester said no more, but heaved an inward sigh. Of what consequence were the words her brother used, so long as he recognized no dignity in life, never set himself _to be!_ Why should any one be taught to behave like a gentleman, so long as he is no gentleman?