r lap; she had just begun to
read it. Her hands, crossed upon each other, had fallen upon the
page; she had found something of herself in those first chapters.
Something that reminded of her old longings and hindrances; of the
shallowness and half-living that had been about her, and the chafe
of her discontent in it.

She did not wonder that Dorothea was going to marry Mr. Casaubon.
Into some dream-trap just such as that she might have fallen, had a
Mr. Casaubon come in her way.

Instead, had come pain and mistake; a keen self-searching; a
learning to bear with all her might, to work, and to wait.

She had not been waiting for any making good in God Providence of
that special happiness which had passed her by. If she had, she
would not have been doing the sort of work she had taken into her
hands. When we wait for one particular hope, and will not be
satisfied with any other, the whole force of ourselves bends toward
it; we dictate to life, and wrest its tendencies at every turn.

The thing comes. Ask,--with the real might of whatever asking there
is in you,--and it shall be given you. But when you have got it, it
may not be the thing you thought it would be. Whosoever will have
his life shall lose it.

No; Desire Ledwith had rather turned away from all special hope,
thinking it was over for her. But she came to believe that all the
good in God's long years was not over; that she had not been
hindered from one thing, save to be kept for some other that He saw
better. She was willing to wait for his better,--his best. When she
paused to look at her life objectively, she rejoiced in it as the
one thread--a thread of changing colors--in God's manifold work,
that He was letting her follow alone with Him, and showing her the
secret beauty of. Up and down, in and out, backward and forward, she
wrought it after his pattern, and discerned continually where it
fell into combinations that she had never planned,--made surprises
for her of effects that were not her own. There is much ridicule of
mere tapestry and broidery work, as a business for women's fingers;
but I think the secret, uninterpreted charm of it, to the silliest
sorters of colors and counters of stitches, is beyond the fact, as
the beauty of children's plays is the parable they cannot help
having in them. Patient and careful doing, after a law and
rule,--and the gradual apparition of result, foreseen by the deviser
of the law and rule; it is life measured out