upon a canvas. Who
knows how,--in this spiritual Kindergarten of a world,--the
rudiments of all small human devices were set in human faculty and
aptness for its own object-teaching toward a perfect heavenly
enlightenment?

Desire was thinking to-night, how impossible it is, as the pattern
of life grows, to help seeing a little of the shapes it may be
taking; to refrain from a looking forward that becomes eager with a
hint of possible unfolding.

Once, a while ago, she had thought that she discerned a green beauty
springing out from the dull, half-filled background; tender leaves
forming about a bare and awkward shoot; but suddenly there were no
more stitches in that direction that she could set; the leaves
stopped short in half-developed curves that never were completed.
The pattern set before her--given but one bit at a time, as life
patterns are, like part etchings of a picture in which you know not
how the spaces are to be filled up and related--changed; the place,
and the tint of the thread, changed also; she had to work on in a
new part, and in a different way. She could not discover then, that
these abortive leaves were the slender claspings of a calyx, in
whose midst might sometime fit the rose-bloom of a wonderful joy.
Was she discovering it now? For browns and grays,--generous and
strong, tender and restful,--was a flush of blossom hues that she
had not looked for, coming to be woven in? Was the empty calyx
showing the first shadowy petal-shapes of a most perfect flower?

It might be the flower of a gracious friendship only a joining of
hands in work for the kingdom-building; she did not let herself go
farther than this. But it was a friendship across which there lay
no bar and somehow, while she put from herself the thought that it
might ever be so promised to her as to be hers of all the world and
to the world's exclusion,--while she resented in herself that
foolish girl's blush, and resolved that it should never come
again,--she sat here to-night thinking how grand and perfect a thing
for a woman a grand man's friendship is; how it is different from
any, the most pure and sweet, of woman-tenderness; how the crossing
of her path with such a path as Christopher Kirkbright's, if it were
only once a day, or once a week, or once a month, would be a thing
to reckon joy and courage from; to live on from, as she lived on
from her prayers.

An hour had come in her life which gathered about her realities of
h