"But I thought we ought to please everybody as much as we could?"
He smiled, put his hand over and turned two or three leaves of the Bible which she kept open at the first of Romans, and pointed to a word in the fifteenth chapter. "Let every one of us please his neighbour for his good, to edification."
"There is your limit," said he. "So far thou mayest go, but no further. And to do that you will find requires quite sufficiently that you should not please yourself. And now how shall we do all this?—how shall we be all this?"
"You are asking the very question!" said Eleanor gravely.
"We must come to the root and spring of all this service and following—it is our love of the Lord himself. That will do it, and nothing else will. 'What things were gain to me, those I counted loss for Christ.'"
"But suppose," said Eleanor, with some difficulty commanding her voice,—"suppose one is deficient in that very thing? suppose one wants that love?"
"Ay!" he said, looking into her face with his eyes of light,—"suppose one does; what then?"
Eleanor could not bear them; her own eyes fell. "What is one to do?"—Mr. Rhys had risen up before he answered, in his deliberate accents,
"'Seek him, that maketh the seven stars and Orion, and turneth the shadow of night into morning.'"
He paced slowly up and down before Eleanor; then went off upon a rambling search through the wood again; seeming to be busy with little things in his way. Eleanor sat still. After a little he came and stood before her with a bunch of ferns and Melic grass and lilies of the valley, which he was ordering in his hands as he spoke.