eart of her that found, suddenly, its
satisfying. If women will look, they can see this.

She knew--she had found out--that she was a fair picture in the
artist's eyes; that the perception keen to discover and test and
analyze all harmonies of form and tint,--holding a hallowed,
mysterious kinship in this power to the Power that had made and
spoken by them,--turned its search upon her, and found her lovely in
the study. It was as if a daisy bearing the pure message and meaning
of the heavenly, could thrill with the consciousness of its
transmission; could feel the exaltation of fulfilling to a human
soul, grand in its far up mystery and waiting upon God,--one of his
dear ideas.

There was something holy in the spirit with which she thus realized
her possession of maidenly beauty; her gift of mental charm and
fitness even; it was the countersign by which she entered into this
realm of which Morris Hewland had the freedom; it belonged to her
also,--she to it; she had received her first recognition. It was a
look back into Paradise for this Eve's daughter, born to labor, but
with a reminiscence in her nature out of which she had built all her
sweetest notions of being, doing, abiding; from which came
the-home-picture, so simple in its outlines, but so rich and gentle
in all its significance, that she had drawn to herself as "her
wish"; the thing she would give most, and do most, to have come
true.

But all this was not necessarily love, even in its beginning,--though
she might come for a while to fancy it so,--for this one
man. It was a thing between her own life and the Maker of it; an
unfolding of herself toward that which waited for her in Him, and
which she should surely come to, whatever she might grasp at
mistakenly and miss upon the way.

Morris Hewland--young, honest-hearted, but full of a young man's
fire and impulse, of an artist's susceptibility to outward beauty,
of the ready delight of educated taste in fresh, natural, responsive
cleverness--was treading dangerous ground.

He, too, knew that he was bewildered; and that if he opened his eyes
he should see no way out of it. Therefore he shut his eyes and
drifted on.

Aunt Blin, with her simplicity,--her incapacity of believing, though
there might be wrong and mischief in the world, that anybody she
knew could ever do it, sat there between them, the most bewildered,
the most inwardly and utterly befooled of the three.

CHAPTER XXII.

BOX FIFTY-