“Would not this drawing room do?” asked his friend.
“Splendidly!” answered Hector. “But what will Mrs. Gillespie say to it?”
“She and I are generally of one mind—about people, at least.”
“Then I will go home at once and set about finding what to say.”
“And I will go out at once and begin hunting you up an audience.”
Gillespie succeeded even better than he had anticipated; and there was at the first lecture a very fair gathering indeed. When it was over, the one that knew most of the subject was the young lecturer’s wife. The first course was followed by two more, the third at the request of almost all his hearers. And the result was that, before the legacy fell due, Annie had paid all their debts and had not contracted a single new one.
But when the happy day dawned Annie was not able to go with her husband to receive the money; neither did Hector wish that she had been able, for he was glad to go alone. By her side lay a lovely woman-child peacefully asleep. Hector declared her the very image of the child the rainbow left behind as it vanished.
One day, when the mother was a little stronger, she called Hector to her bedside, and playfully claimed the right to be the child’s godmother, and to give it her name.
“And who else can have so good a right?” answered Hector. Yet he wondered just a little that Annie should want the child named after herself, and not after her mother.
But when the time for the child’s baptism came, Annie, who would hold the little one herself, whispered in the ear of the clergyman:
“The child’s name is Iris.”