r
way all things loved or loving?"

"My daughter," answered Isabel, "I am assured--and the longer I live the
more assured I am--that the way which God marketh out for each one of
His chosen is the right way, the best way, and for that one the only
way. Every pang given to us, if we be Christ's, is a pang that could
not be spared. `As He was, so are we in this world;' and with us, as
with Him, `thus it _must_ be.' All our Lord's followers wear His crown
of thorns; but theirs, under His loving hand, bud and flower; which His
never did, till He could cry upon the rood, `It is finished.'"

"But could not God," said Philippa, a little timidly, "have given us
more grace to avoid sinning, rather than have needed thus to burn our
sins out of us with hot irons?"

"Thou art soaring up into the seventh Heaven of God's purposes, my
child," answered Isabel with a smile; "I have no wings to follow thee so
far."

"Thou thinkest, then, mother," replied Philippa with a sigh, "that we
cannot understand the matter at all."

"We can understand only what is revealed to us," replied Isabel; "and
that, I grant, is but little; yet it is enough. `As many as I love, I
rebuke and chasten.' `What son is he whom the father chasteneth not?'
How could it be otherwise? He were no wise father nor loving, who
should teach his son nothing, or should forbear to rebuke him for such
folly as might hereafter be his ruin."

Isabel was silent, and Philippa's memory went back to those old loveless
days at Arundel, when for her there had been no chastening, no rebuke,
only cold, lifeless apathy. That was not love. And she thought also of
her half-sister Alesia, whom she had visited once since her marriage,
and who brought up her children on the principle of no contradiction and
unlimited indulgence; and remembering how discontented and hard to
please this discipline had made them, she began to see that was not love
either.

"Thou hast wrought arras, my daughter," said Isabel again. "Thou
knowest, therefore, that to turn the arras the backward way showeth not
the pattern. The colours are all mixed out of proportion, as the
fastenings run in and out. So our life is in this world. The arras
shall only be turned the right way above, when the angels of God shall
see it, and marvel at the fair proportions and beauteous colours of that
which looked so rough and misshapen here below.

"Moreover, we are thus tried, methinks, not only for our own goo