The Rainbow

Tilly returned with a large leaf and found the two silent. At

once he felt it incumbent on him to speak, now the serving-woman

had come back.

"How old is your little girl?" he asked.

"Four years," she replied.

"Her father hasn't been dead long, then?" he asked.

"She was one year when he died."

"Three years?"

"Yes, three years that he is dead--yes."

Curiously quiet she was, almost abstracted, answering these

questions. She looked at him again, with some maidenhood opening

in her eyes. He felt he could not move, neither towards her nor

away from her. Something about her presence hurt him, till he

was almost rigid before her. He saw the girl's wondering look

rise in her eyes.

Tilly handed her the butter and she rose.

"Thank you very much," she said. "How much is it?"

"We'll make th' vicar a present of it," he said. "It'll do

for me goin' to church."

"It 'ud look better of you if you went to church and took th'

money for your butter," said Tilly, persistent in her claim to

him.

"You'd have to put in, shouldn't you?" he said.

"How much, please?" said the Polish woman to Tilly. Brangwen

stood by and let be.

"Then, thank you very much," she said.

"Bring your little girl down sometime to look at th' fowls

and horses," he said,--"if she'd like it."

"Yes, she would like it," said the stranger.

And she went. Brangwen stood dimmed by her departure. He

could not notice Tilly, who was looking at him uneasily, wanting

to be reassured. He could not think of anything. He felt that he

had made some invisible connection with the strange woman.

A daze had come over his mind, he had another centre of

consciousness. In his breast, or in his bowels, somewhere in his

body, there had started another activity. It was as if a strong

light were burning there, and he was blind within it, unable to

know anything, except that this transfiguration burned between

him and her, connecting them, like a secret power.

Since she had come to the house he went about in a daze,

scarcely seeing even the things he handled, drifting, quiescent,

in a state of metamorphosis. He submitted to that which was

happening to him, letting go his will, suffering the loss of

himself, dormant always on the brink of ecstasy, like a creature

evolving to a new birth.