e one with last fond words to say after the farewell; and
this excess of either regard for the priest's feelings or else a
devoutness he had not suspected in her quickened Gerald's attention. And
there in the dimness he saw what he had not seen in the broad light of
day, that his friend's little face, which had presented the effect of a
house with all the blinds drawn down, was lighted up behind the
blinds--oh, lighted as if for a feast!

He felt himself at sea. He had thought he knew the circumstances. Some
part, of course, nobody could know unless Brenda chose to tell them. But
what reason there should be for positive joy--

A suspicion flashed across his mind. He looked at her more closely, and
put it away.

She might have been the wisest of the virgins, the one who before any
other heard the music of the bridegroom and was first to light her lamp.
She stood as if listening to his footsteps.

[Illustration: After it she still stood a moment, looking toward the
sanctuary]

That such a simile should have been possible to Gerald shows how much
the expression of Brenda's face centered attention on itself, for her
white serge dress was in the fashion of that year, and it was not a
fashion to be remembered with any artistic joy. Gerald was never
reconciled to it.

He had the power to detach himself and at will see persons as if he
looked at them for the first time. So for a moment he saw Brenda as a
thing solely of form and color, a white shape against a ground of gloom,
and took new account of the fact that the little girl who had had
pigtails when he first knew her, and gone to the _Diaconesse_ with
lunch-basket and satchel of books, had from one season to the next,
stealthily, as it were, and while his back was turned, become beautiful.

More than that. He was looking at Brenda--he recognized it with a pulse
of exquisite interest--in her exact and particular hour. He had
surprised a rose at its moment of transition from bud to bloom, that
delicate and perfect moment when the natural beauty which women and
fruits and flowers have in common, reaching its height, hangs
poised--for such a pitifully short time, alas!--before it changes, if
not declines, to something less dewily fresh, less heart-movingly
untouched, less complete.

The artist could not long in this case be regarding the girl as part of
a picture; his human relation to the owner of that lifted profile
brought him back to wondering in what the quiet e