When she was only excitedly afraid there wouldn’t!  I cannot justify little Bel.  I do not try to.

“Now, see! isn’t it beautiful?”

“It sags just a crumb, here at the left,” said Aunt Blin, poking and stooping under Bel’s elbow.  “No; it is only a baste give way.  You shouldn’t have sprung so, child.”

The bare neck and the dimpled arms showed from among the cream-pink tints like the high white lights upon the rose.  Bel had not looked in the glass yet:  Aunt Blin was busy, and she really had not thought of it; she was happy just in being in that beautiful raiment—­in the heart of its color and shine; feeling its softly rustling length float away from her, and reach out radiantly behind.  What is there about that sweeping and trailing that all women like, and that becomes them so?  That even the little child pins a shawl about her waist and walks to and fro, looking over her shoulder, to get a sensation of?

The door did shut, below.  A step did come up the stairs, with a few light springs.

Suddenly Bel was ashamed!

She did not want it, now that it had come!  She had set a dreadful trap for herself!

“O, Aunt Blin, let me go!  Put something over me!” she whispered.

But Aunt Blin was down on the floor, far behind her, drawing out and arranging the slope of the train, measuring from hem to band with her professional eye.

The footstep suddenly checked; then, as if with an as swift bethinking, it went by.  But through that door ajar, in that bright light that revealed the room, Morris Hewland had been smitten with the vision; had seen little Bel Bree in all the possible 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.