“Why,” exclaimed Bramber, “you are crying!”
“It is so true, it is so beautiful,” she said, and her voice shook; and as she spoke the tears ran down her white cheeks. “How did he who wrote that know about my illness, and that I was thinking about, and troubled about, the daffodils when I was in my fever? It is all true”; she put her hands to her bosom; “I feel it--I cannot bear it.”
Walter Bramber paused in surprise. He was himself a passionate lover of nature, of flowers, and he was fond of the words of the poet of nature--words that touched deep chords in his spirit. But here was a pale, reserved girl, to whom the words of the poet appealed with even greater force than to himself.
“Are you fond of poetry?” he asked.
She hesitated, and slightly coloured before answering.
“I do not know. Father sings a song or two. There are words, they rhyme, and they are set to a tune, and sometimes a good tune helps along bad words; but I never before heard words that had the music in themselves and wanted nothing to carry them along as on the wings of a bird. When you read that to me, it was just as though I heard what I had felt in my heart over and over again, and had never found how I could put it.”
“Do you know why these flowers are called daffodils?”
She turned her solemn eyes on him again.
“Because they are daffodils; why else?”
“I suppose,” said Bramber, “when the Normans came to England, they brought these yellow flowers with them, and with the flowers the name by which they had known them in Normandy--Fleurs d’Avril, which means April flowers.”