surprises for her of effects that were not her own.  There is much ridicule of mere tapestry and broidery work, as a business for women’s fingers; but I think the secret, uninterpreted charm of it, to the silliest sorters of colors and counters of stitches, is beyond the fact, as the beauty of children’s plays is the parable they cannot help having in them.  Patient and careful doing, after a law and rule,—­and the gradual apparition of result, foreseen by the deviser of the law and rule; it is life measured out 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 heaven, whether the earthly correspondence should concur, or no.  A noble influence which had met and moved her, seemed to come and abide about her,—­a thought-presence.