"How flat the bow looks from this height," said the man.
"Fancy noting the shape with your eyes full of the colour!" answered the woman.
He started and laughed.
"How curiously like poor Christopher Yeoland you said that, Honor. And how like him to say it."
Myles and his wife were just returning from payment of a visit. They had now been married a few months, and, with the recent past, there had lifted off the head of the husband a load of anxiety. He looked younger and his forehead seemed more open; he felt younger by a decade of years, and his face only clouded at secret moments with one daily care. Despite his whole-hearted and unconcealed joy he went in fear, for there were vague suspicions in his head that the happiness of his heart was too great. He believed that never, within human experience, had any man approached so perilously near to absolute contentment as he did then. Thus in his very happiness lay his alarm. As a reasonable being, he knew that human life never makes enduring progress upon such fairy lines, and he searched his horizon for the inevitable clouds. But none appeared to his sight. Every letter he opened, every day that he awakened, he expected, and even vaguely hoped for reverses to balance his life, for minor troubles to order his existence more nearly with his experience. He had been quite content to meet those usual slings and arrows ranged against every man along the highway side of his pilgrimage; and tribulation of a sort had made him feel safer in the citadel of his good fortune. Indeed, he could conceive of no shaft capable of serious penetration in his case, so that it spared the lives of himself and his wife. Now the balance was set one way, and Providence blessed the pair with full measure, pressed down and running over. All succeeded on their land; all prospered in their homestead; all went well with their hearts. On sleepless nights Stapledon fancied he heard a kind, ghostly watchman cry out as much under the stars; and hearing, he would turn and thank the God he did not know and sleep again.
"Gone!" said Honor, looking out where the rainbow died and the gleam of it was swept out of being by the sturdy wind.
"So quickly; yet it spoke a true word before the wind scattered it; told us so many things that only a rainbow can. It is everlasting, because it is true. There's a beauty in absolute stark truth, Honor."
"Is there? Then the multiplication table's beautiful, dear love. If a rainbow teaches me anything, it is what a short-lived matter beauty must be—beauty and happiness and all that makes life worth living."
"But our rainbow is not built upon the mist."
"Don't think about the roots of it. So you are satisfied, leave them alone. To analyse happiness is worse and more foolish, I should think, than hunting for rainbow gold itself."