No woman is so bad but we may rejoice when her heart thrills to love, for then God has her by the hand.  There is no love but this.  She may dream of what love is, but it is only of a sudden that she knows.  Babbie, who was without a guide from her baby days, had dreamed but little of it, hearing its name given to another thing.  She had been born wild and known no home; no one had touched her heart except to strike it, she had been educated, but never tamed; her life had been thrown strangely among those who were great in the world’s possessions, but she was not of them.  Her soul was in such darkness that she had never seen it; she would have danced away cynically from the belief that there is such a thing, and now all at once she had passed from disbelief to knowledge.  Is not love God’s doing?  To Gavin He had given something of Himself, and the moment she saw it the flash lit her own soul.

It was but little of his Master that was in Gavin, but far smaller things have changed the current of human lives; the spider’s thread that strikes our brow on a country road may do that.  Yet this I will say, though I have no wish to cast the little minister on my pages larger than he was, that he had some heroic hours in Thrums, of which one was when Babbie learned to love him.  Until the moment when he kissed her she had only conceived him a quaint fellow whose life was a string of Sundays, but behold what she saw in him now.  Evidently to his noble mind her mystery was only some misfortune, not of her making, and his was to be the part of leading her away from it into the happiness of the open life.  He did not doubt her, for he loved, and to doubt is to dip love in the mire.  She had been given to him by God, and he was so rich in her possession that the responsibility attached to the gift was not grievous.  She was his, and no mortal man could part them.  Those who looked askance at her were looking askance at him; in so far as she was wayward and wild, he was those things; so long as she remained strange to religion, the blame lay on him.

All this Babbie read in the Gavin of the past night, and to her it was the book of love.  What things she had known, said and done in that holy name!  How shamefully have we all besmirched it!  She had only known it as the most selfish of the passions, a brittle image that men consulted because it could only answer in the words they gave it to say.  But here was a man to whom love was something better than his own desires leering on a pedestal.  Such love as Babbie had seen hitherto made strong men weak, but this was a love that made a weak man strong.  All her life, strength had been her idol, and the weakness that bent to her cajolery her scorn.  But only now was it revealed to her that strength, instead of being the lusty child of passions, grows by grappling with and throwing them.

So Babbie loved the little minister for the best that she had ever seen in man.  I shall be told that she thought far more of him than he deserved, forgetting the mean in the worthy:  but who that has had a glimpse of heaven will care to let his mind dwell henceforth on earth?  Love, it is said, is blind, but love is not blind.  It is an extra eye, which shows us what is most worthy of regard.  To see the best is to see most clearly, and it is the lover’s privilege.