sible flush of
fair array, and marvelous blossom of consummate, adorned loveliness.

Somehow, it broke down the safeguard he had had.

In what was Bel Bree different, really, from women who wore such
robes as that, with whom he had danced and chatted in drawing-rooms?
Only in being a thousand times fresher and prettier.

After that, he began to make reasons for speaking to them. He
brought Aunt Blin a lot of illustrated papers; he lent them a
stereoscope, with Alpine and Italian views; he brought down a
picture of his own, one day, to show them; before October was out,
he had spent an evening in Aunt Blin's room, reading aloud to them
"Mireio."

Among the strange metaphysical doublings which human nature
discovers in itself, there is such a fact, not seldom experienced,
as the dreaming of a dream.

It is one thing to dream utterly, so that one believes one is
awake; it is another to sleep in one's dream, and in a vision give
way to vision. It is done in sleep, it is done also in life.

This was what Bel Bree--and it is with her side of the experience
that I have business--was in danger now of doing.

It is done in life, as to many forms of living--as to religion, as
to art. People are religious, not infrequently because they are in
love with the idea of being so, not because they are simply and
directly devoted to God. They are aesthetic, because "The Beautiful"
is so beautiful, to see and to talk of, and they choose to affect
artistic having and doing; but they have not come even into that
sheepfold by the door, by the honest, inevitable pathway that their
nature took because it must,--by the entrance that it found through
a force of celestial urging and guidance that was behind them all
the while, though they but half knew it or understood.

Women fall in love that way, so often! It is a lovely thing to be
loved; there is new living, which seems to them rare and grand, into
which it offers to lift them up. They fall into a dream about a
dream; they do not lay them down to sleep and give the Lord their
souls to keep, till He shall touch their trustful rest with a divine
fire, and waken them into his apocalypse.

It was this atmosphere in which Morris Hewland lived, and which he
brought about him to transfuse the heavier air of her lowly living,
that bewildered Bel. And she knew that she was bewildered. She knew
that it was the poetic side of her nature that was stirred, excited;
not the real deep, woman's h