building is finished, and the feeding of the younglings a good time
yet in the future. We can see one little brown lady hovering warm
eggs under her breast, her bright eyes peeping through a screen of
leaves as she glances up at her singing lord, pouring out his thanks
for the morning sun. There is only a hint of breeze, it might
almost be the whisper of uncurling fern fronds, but soft as it is,
it stirs the branches here and there, and I know that it is rocking
hundreds of tiny cradles in the forest.

When I was always painting in those other days before I met Himself,
one might think my eyes would have been even keener to see beauty
than now, when my brushes are more seldom used; but it is not so.
There is something, deep hidden in my consciousness, that makes all
loveliness lovelier, that helps me to interpret it in a different
and in a larger sense. I have a feeling that I have been lifted out
of the individual and given my true place in the general scheme of
the universe, and, in some subtle way that I can hardly explain, I
am more nearly related to all things good, beautiful, and true than
I was when I was wholly an artist, and therefore less a woman. The
bursting of the leaf-buds brings me a tender thought of the one dear
heart that gives me all its spring; and whenever I see the smile of
a child, a generous look, the flash of sympathy in an eye, it makes
me warm with swift remembrance of the one I love the best of all,
just 'as a lamplight will set a linnet singing for the sun.'

Love is doing the same thing for Francesca; for the smaller feelings
merge themselves in the larger ones, as little streams lose
themselves in oceans. Whenever we talk quietly together of that
strange, new, difficult life that she is going so bravely and so
joyously to meet, I know by her expression that Ronald's noble face,