A rapid flush of colour came to Cicely's face. "To improve and amend!" she said quickly. "Ah! you speak at your ease, Mr. Mildmay--in a parish where papa has been working for twenty years!"
Mildmay gave her a startled, wondering look. To be thus interrupted while you are riding, full tilt, your favourite hobby, is very confusing. He scarcely took in the meaning of the words "working for twenty years."
"Twenty years--all my lifetime and more; and you think you can mend it all at once like an old shoe!" cried Cicely, her cheeks flaming. Then she said, subduing herself, "I beg your pardon. What you say is quite right, I know."
But by this time her words began to take their proper meaning to his mind. "Has Mr. St. John been here so long?" he said. "I hope you don't think I undervalue his work. I am sure it must have been better than anything I with my inexperience can do; but yet----"
"Ah! you will learn; you are young; and we always think we can do better than the old people. I do myself often," said Cicely, under her breath.
"I did not mean anything so presumptuous," he said; "indeed, I did not know. I thought of myself, as one does so often without being aware--I hope you will not form a bad opinion of me, Miss St. John. I accepted the living for the sake of the work, not for any smaller motive. Books and society are not life. It seemed to me that to instruct one's fellow-creatures so far as one can, to help them as far as one can, to bring a higher ideal into their existence----"
Cicely was bewildered by this manner of speech. She did not quite understand it. No one had ever spoken to her of a high ideal; a great deal had been said to her one time and another about doing her duty, but nothing of this. She was dazzled, and yet half contemptuous, as ignorance so often is. "A high ideal for the poor folk in the village, and Wilkins the grocer, and old Mrs. Joel with her pigs?" she cried mocking; yet while she said it, she blushed for herself.
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.