The artist who takes your photograph must carry you with him into his “developing” room, and he will give you a more exact illustration of the truth just mentioned.  There is nothing to be seen on the glass just taken from the camera.  But there is a potential, though invisible, picture hid in the creamy film which covers it.  Watch him as he pours a wash over it, and you will see that miracle wrought which is at once a surprise and a charm,—­the sudden appearance of your own features where a moment before was a blank without a vestige of intelligence or beauty.

In some such way the grave warnings of Master Byles Gridley had called up a fully shaped, but hitherto unworded, train of thought in the consciousness of Myrtle Hazard.  It was not merely their significance, it was mainly because they were spoken at the fitting time.  If they had been uttered a few weeks earlier, when Myrtle was taking the first stitch on the embroidered slippers, they would have been as useless as the artist’s developing solution on a plate which had never been exposed in the camera.  But she had been of late in training for her lesson in ways that neither she nor anybody else dreamed of.  The reader who has shrugged his (or her) shoulders over the last illustration will perhaps hear this one which follows more cheerfully.  The physician in the Arabian Nights made his patient play at ball with a bat, the hollow handle of which contained drugs of marvellous efficacy.  Whether it was the drugs that made the sick man get well, or the exercise, is not of so much consequence as the fact that he did at any rate get well.

These walks which Myrtle had taken with her reverend counsellor had given her a new taste for the open air, which was what she needed just now more than confessions of faith or spiritual paroxysms.  And so it happened that, while he had been stimulating all those imaginative and emotional elements of her nature which responded to the keys he loved to play upon, the restoring influences of the sweet autumnal air, the mellow sunshine, the soothing aspects of the woods and fields and sky, had been quietly doing their work.  The color was fast returning to her cheek, and the discords of her feelings and her thoughts gradually resolving themselves into the harmonious and cheerful rhythms of bodily and mental health.  It needed but the timely word from the fitting lips to change the whole programme of her daily mode of being.  The word had been spoken.  She saw its truth; but how hard it is to tear away a cherished illusion, to cast out an unworthy intimate!  How hard for any!—­but for a girl so young, and who had as yet found so little to love and trust, how cruelly hard!