Since the time of fairy-tales Love has had a way of coming in the disguise of Duty.  What is the story of Beauty and the Beast but an allegory of true love?  We take this maid to be our wedded wife, for her sake it perhaps seems at the time.  She is sweet and beautiful and to be desired; but, all the same, we had rather shake the loose leg of bachelordom, if it might be.  However it be, so we take her, or maybe it is she takes us, with a feeling of martyrdom; but lo! when we are home together, what wonderful new lights are these beginning to ray about her, as though she had up till now kept a star hidden in her bosom.  What is this new morning strength and peace in our life?  Why, we thought it was but Thestylis, and lo! it is Diana after all.  For the Thirteenth Maid or the Thirteenth Man, both alike, rarely come as we had expected.  There seems no fitness in their arrival.  It seems so ridiculously accidental, as I suppose the hour of death, whenever it comes, will seem.  One had expected some high calm prelude of preparation, ending in a festival of choice, like an Indian prince’s, when the maids of the land pass before him and he makes deliberate selection of the fateful She.  But, instead, we are hurrying among our day’s business, maybe, our last thought of her; we turn a corner, and suddenly she is before us.  Or perhaps, as it fell with Narcissus, we have tried many loves that proved but passions; we have just buried the last, and are mournfully leaving its grave, determined to seek no further, to abjure bright eyes, at least for a long while, when lo! on a sudden a little maid is in our path holding out some sweet modest flowers.  The maid has a sweet mouth, too, and, the old Adam being stronger than our infant resolution, we smell the flowers and kiss the mouth—­to find arms that somehow, we know not why, are clinging as for life about us.  Let us beware how we shake them off, for thus it is decreed shall a man meet her to have missed whom were to have missed all.  Youth, like that faithless generation in the Scriptures, always craveth after a sign, but rarely shall one be given.  It can only be known whether a man be worthy of Love by the way in which he looks upon Duty.  Rachel often comes in the grey cloak of Leah.  It rests with the man’s heart whether he shall know her beneath the disguise; no other divining-rod shall aid him.  If it be as Bassanio’s, brave to ‘give and hazard all he hath,’ let him not fear to pass the seeming gold, the seeming silver, to choose the seeming lead.  ‘Why, that’s the lady,’ thou poor magnificent Morocco.  Nor shall the gold fail, for her heart is that, and for silver thou shalt have those ‘silent silver lights undreamed of’ of face and soul.

These are but scattered hints of the story of Narcissus’ love as he told it me at last, in broken, struggling words, but with a light in his face one power alone could set there.