"Service, sacrifice. Giving, not receiving; asking, not answer." The words reverberated through her consciousness like a funeral knell. She dropped the stained lily and called again, weakly: "Alden!"
But, as before, he did not answer. His eyes were fixed upon a distant point where the coloured mists were slowly lifting. Rosemary, cold and still, could only stand there and watch, for her feet refused to stir.
Hungrily, she gazed upon him, but he did not see, for he was watching the drifting rainbow beyond. Then a cry of rapture broke from him and he started eagerly toward the insurmountable crags that divided him from the Vision.
Rosemary saw it, too, at the same instant—a woman whose white gown shimmered and shone, and whose face was hidden by the blinding glory of her sunlit hair.
She woke, murmuring his name, then rubbed her eyes. It took her several minutes to realise that it was all a dream. She was in her own little room in the brown house, and the sun was peeping through the shutters. The holes in the rag carpet, the cheap, cracked mirror, the braided mat in front of her washstand, and the broken pitcher all contrived to reassure her.
The Fair Future
She sat up in bed, knowing that it was time to get up, but desperately needing a few moments in which to adjust herself to her realities. What had happened? Nothing, indeed, since yesterday—ah, that dear yesterday, when life had begun! What could ever happen now, when all the future lay fair before her and the miseries of her twenty-five years were overwhelmed by one deep intoxicating joy?
"Dreams," thought Rosemary, laughing to herself. "Ah, what are dreams!"
She opened the shutters wide and the daylight streamed in. It was not fraught with colour, like the mists of her dream, but was the clear, sane light of every day. A robin outside her window chirped cheerily, and a bluebird flashed across the distant meadow, then paused on the rushes at the bend of the river and swayed there for a moment, like some unfamiliar flower.