And now on the floor lay the garden daisy-head, and towards it the purple-red streamlet was pushing on; was the daisy already touched, and the edges of the fringe of petals just tinctured? Or was its redness due to the reflection on the pure white of the advancing blood? The dye or glow was setting inward, whatever it was, and would soon stain the petals crimson, and then sop the golden heart and turn it black.
How long this process would require Urith did not ask, for time was nothing to her. But she looked and waited, she fancied that she saw the clotting together of the rays, and their gradual discoloration as the red liquid rose up through the yellow stamens.
And now the flower-head began to stir and slide over the floor, and the blood-streak to crawl after it.
Urith slowly rose to her feet, and, with bent head, observing the flower, step by step followed it. There was a draught blowing along the floor from a back-door that was open, and this stirred and carried forward the light blossom. Urith never inquired what moved the daisy; it was natural, it was reasonable, that it should recoil from the scent and touch of blood.
As the daisy-head slid forward—now with easy motion, now with a leap and a skip—so did, in Urith's diseased fancy, the rill of blood advance in pursuit, always just touching it, but never entirely enveloping it.
Urith stepped forward slowly towards the hall-door and opened it, to let the flower-head escape. Had she not done so, in a moment the daisy would have been caught, and have sopped up the blood like a sponge, lost all its whiteness, and become but a shapeless clot in the stream.
The draught, increased by the opening of the door, carried the little delicate blossom forward rapidly, into the hall and along its floor, and after it shot the head of the rivulet, pointed, like that of a snake darting on its prey. Then the daisy was arrested suddenly; it had struck against an obstruction—a man's foot.
Urith rose from her stooping position, and saw before her the man whose foot had stopped the daisy—it was Anthony, standing on the hearthstone. To her dazed sense it was nothing that the blood-stream should run in the course opposed to that it might have been supposed to run, from the parlour to the hall, from the door to the hearth. To her mind the ideal hall and the actual hall only coincided when they overlapped.
And now, standing on the actual hearthstone, with the fancied blood-stream running up to, and dancing about his foot, was Anthony.
"Urith!"