smell of its own balm and dew. The fragrance and beauty of the time
passed into her soul, and awakened corners there all unused to such
sweet incense. She was drunken with the wine that is not of grapes. She
could not have found words for the passion that possessed her, though
she hugged it to her heart like another self; but it was elemental,
springing from founts deeper than those of life and death. God made it,
and, like all His making, it was divine. She sat there, the
southernwood still gathered into her arms, and at last emotion stilled
itself, and passed into thought; a wild temptation rose, and with its
first whisper drove a hot flush into her cheeks, and branded it there.
Love! she had never named the name in its first natal significance. She
had scarcely read it; for romance, even in books, had passed her by.
But love! she knew it as the insect knows how to spread his new
sun-dried wings in the air for which he was create. Sitting there, in a
happy drowse, she thought it all out. She was old, plain, unsought; the
man she exalted was the flower of his kind. He would never look on her
as if she might touch the hem of wifehood's mantle; so there would be
no shame in choosing him. Just to herself, she might name the Great
Name. He would not know. Only her own soul would know, and God who gave
it, and sent it forth fitted with delicate, reaching tentacles to touch
the rock set there to wound them. She began to feel blindly that God
was not alone the keeper of eternal Sabbaths, but the germinant heat at
the heart of the world. If she were a young girl, like Phoebe, there
would be shame. Even a thought of him would be a stretching forth her
hand to touch him, saying, "Look at me! I am here!" but for her it was
quite different. It would be like a dream, some grandmother dreamed in
the sun, of rosy youth and the things that never came to pass. No one
would be harmed, and the sleeper would have garnered one hour's joy
before she took up her march again on the lonesomest road of all,--so
lonesome, although it leads us, home! Thus she thought, half sleeping,