s, where any shop-girl, as freely as the most
elegant connoisseur, can go in and delight her eyes, and inform her
perceptions,--these, without the face even, which had turned its
magnetism straight upon hers only once or twice, and whose
revelation was that of a life related to things wide and full and
manifold,--gave her the stimulating sense of a something to which
she had not come, but to which she felt a strange belonging.

Beside,--alongside--in each mind, was the undeveloped mystery; the
spell under which a man receives such intuitions through a woman's
presence,--a woman through a man's. Yet these two individuals were
not, therefore, going to be necessary to each other, in the plan of
God. Other things might show that they were not meant, in rightness,
for each other; they represented mutually, something that each life
missed; but the something was in no special companionship; it was a
great deal wider and higher than that. They might have to learn that
it was so, nevertheless, by some briefly painful process of
experience. If in this process they should fall into mistake and
wrong,--ah, there would come the experience beyond the experience,
the depth they were not meant to sound, yet which, if they let their
game of life run that way, they could not get back from but through
the uttermost. They must play it out; the move could not be taken
back,--yet awhile. The possible better combinations are in God's
knowledge; how He may ever reset the pieces and give his good
chances again, remains the hidden hope, resting upon the Christ that
is in the heart of Him.

One morning Morris Hewland had come up the stairs with a handful of
tuberoses; he was living at home, then, through the pleasant
September, at his father's country place, whence the household would
soon remove to the city for the winter.

Miss Bree's door was open. She was just replacing her door-mat,
which she had been shaking out of the entry window. She had an old
green veil tied down over her head to keep the dust off; nobody
could suspect any harm of a wish or a willingness to have a word
with her; Morris Hewland could not have suspected it of himself, if
he had indeed got so far as to investigate his passing impulses.
There was something pitiful in the contrast, perhaps, of the pure,
fresh, exquisite blossoms, and the breath of sweet air he and they
brought with them in their swift transit from the places where it
blessed all things to the places whe