Only her face remained to him, with its
cerulean eyes--the eyes of Annie, looking up from under the cloud of her
dark hair, which also was Annie's. She looked then as she stood, in his
memory of her, as if she were saying, "I trust in you; will you not
trust in Him who made the rainbow?" For a moment he seemed to stand
regarding her, but even while he looked he must have forgotten that she
was there before him, for when again he knew that he saw her, though he
did not seem ever to have looked away from her, she had changed in the
gathering darkness to the phantasm of a daisy, which still gazed up in
his face trustingly, and, indeed, went with him to his own door, seeming
all the time to say, "It was no child; it was me you saw, and nothing
but me; only I saw the sun--I mean, the man that was making the
rainbow." And never more could he in his mind separate the child, whom I
cannot but think he had verily seen, from the daisy which certainly he
had not seen, except in the atmosphere of his troubled and confused
soul.
It may help my reader to understand its confusion if I recall to him the
fact that Hector had that day eaten nothing. Nor must my wife reader
think hardly of Annie for having let him leave the house without any
food, for he had stolen softly away, and closed the door as softly
behind him, thinking how merrily they would eat together when he came
back with his good news. And now he was bringing nothing to her but the
story of a poor woman and her child who had warmed him, and of an
omnibus-conductor who had trusted him for his fare, and of a rainbow and
a child and a daisy.
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