It is done in life, as to many forms of living—­as to religion, as to art.  People are religious, not infrequently because they are in love with the idea of being so, not because they are simply and directly devoted to God.  They are aesthetic, because “The Beautiful” is so beautiful, to see and to talk of, and they choose to affect artistic having and doing; but they have not come even into that sheepfold by the door, by the honest, inevitable pathway that their nature took because it must,—­by the entrance that it found through a force of celestial urging and guidance that was behind them all the while, though they but half knew it or understood.

Women fall in love that way, so often!  It is a lovely thing to be loved; there is new living, which seems to them rare and grand, into which it offers to lift them up.  They fall into a dream about a dream; they do not lay them down to sleep and give the Lord their souls to keep, till He shall touch their trustful rest with a divine fire, and waken them into his apocalypse.

It was this atmosphere in which Morris Hewland lived, and which he brought about him to transfuse the heavier air of her lowly living, that bewildered Bel.  And she knew that she was bewildered.  She knew that it was the poetic side of her nature that was stirred, excited; not the real deep, woman’s heart of her that found, suddenly, its satisfying.  If women will look, they can see this.

She knew—­she had found out—­that she was a fair picture in the artist’s eyes; that the perception keen to discover and test and analyze all harmonies of form and tint,—­holding a hallowed, mysterious kinship in this power to the Power that had made and spoken by them,—­turned its search upon her, and found her lovely in the study.  It was as if a daisy bearing the pure message and meaning of the heavenly, could thrill with the consciousness of its transmission; could feel the exaltation of fulfilling to a human soul, grand in its far up mystery and waiting upon God,—­one of his dear ideas.

There was something holy in the spirit with which she thus realized her possession of maidenly beauty; her gift of mental charm and fitness even; it was the countersign by which she entered into this realm of which Morris Hewland had the freedom; it belonged to her also,—­she to it; she had received her first recognition.  It was a look back into Paradise for this Eve’s daughter, born to labor, but with a reminiscence in her nature out of which she had built all her sweetest notions of being, doing, abiding; from which came the-home-picture, so simple in its outlines, but so rich and gentle in all its significance, that she had drawn to herself as “her wish”; the thing she would give most, and do most, to have come true.

But all this was not necessarily love, even in its beginning,—­though she might come for a while to fancy it so,—­for this one man.  It was a thing between her own life and the Maker of it; an unfolding of herself toward that which waited for her in Him, and which she should surely come to, whatever she might grasp at mistakenly and miss upon the way.