On her part, Bel Bree got a glimpse, she knew not how, of a world above and beyond her own; a world of beauty, of power, of reach and elevation, in which people like Morris Hewland dwelt.  His step, his voice, his words now and then to the friend or two whom he had the habit of bringing in with him,—­the mere knowledge that he “made pictures,” such pictures as she looked at in the windows and in art-dealers’ rooms, 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 where so much languished in the need of it, not knowing, even, the privation.  The old, trodden, half-cleansed door-mat in her hands,—­the just-created beauty in his.  He stopped, and divided his handful.