“Thank you, yes.”
“And often?”
Then she had to promise again. Dr. Towne was seldom at home; she thought of this when she promised. She was thinking of it that evening in the early twilight as she weeded among her pansies. Dine said that it was a wonder that she had not turned into a pansy herself by this time.
“Daughter, why do you sigh?”
Her father was seated in a rustic chair on the piazza with a copy of Burns unopened upon his knee; he had left the store earlier than usual that afternoon, complaining of the old pain in his side.
“My sigh must be very loud or your ears very sharp,” she replied, lifting her head. “I will bring you some perfect pansies.”
He took them and looked down at them; she stood at his side smoothing the straggling locks on his bald forehead with her perfumed, soiled fingers. “I think that if I knew nothing about God but that He made pansies, I should love Him for that,” she said at last.
“Is that what you were sighing over?”
“The sigh came out of the heart of the pansy. I wish I knew how to love somebody.”
“Is that what you were sighing over?”