"I don't know that I do. One is taught; I was taught. I suppose I believe in the arithmetic I learned, and in the geography I learned——"
She broke off suddenly as a little wind, as it were, blew across the placid sunlit sea of her consciousness, shattering the brightnesses.
"But because I have learned a thing it does not become part of me, as people tell me," she said. "You have to leaven a thing with love in order to assimilate it. I've always known that those things are bone of your bone to you, part of you, vital part of you, part that could not be amputated. Even the fact that you have never talked to me about them has shown that. You don't tell me that you love me, simply because it is part of you to do so; nor do I remind you that I have ten fingers and ten toes."
She checked her horse as they emerged from the lane into the stream of the traffic that was passing into the native city.
"That's why we have never talked about it, daddy," she said in sudden enlightenment. "It was too real to you, and it didn't touch me."
She had never seen him so troubled.
"Didn't touch you?" he asked. "You don't believe——"
Elizabeth laid her hand on his knee.
"Daddy dear, I believe in all things living and beautiful, and true. Don't take it to heart—pray don't. Does—does the blossom know what fruit is coming? But surely the fruit comes."
Swiftly, suddenly at this supreme instant of sunset, all the world was changed; it was as if it passed into the heart of an opal. The dust of the main road into which the two had just turned was transfigured into mist of gold and rose; the wayfarers who passed along, plodding home with camels and mild-eyed buffaloes, were changed into citizens of some rainbow-kingdom. More brilliant grew the excellent opalescence, and then all the tints of it were sucked up into one soft crimson that flooded earth and sky. Then, as the darkness began to overlay it, it grew dusky and yet duskier, till the incarnadined air was robbed of its glories. But high above them northwards and eastwards flamed the rose-coloured snows.