Free Sophie and the Rising Sun by Augusta Trobaugh

brush. Mr. Oto looked at her where she sat gazing at the sky.
    “I have never been able to paint the sky exactly as I see it,’’ she confessed.
    “May I look?’’
    “Of course,” she laughed. “ I’m not timid!” She didn’t add, As you are . But he could sense her unspoken teasing. So that he smiled as he leaned just enough to be able to see her painting.
    “It is good,” he pronounced genuinely, nodding his head. “What you have painted is very good.’’
    “But it’s not the way I really see it,” she explained. “Because the sky that’s over where the river and the ocean come together is very beautiful—very different—in a special way. And I just can’t seem to get it right, on the paper.’’
    Mr. Oto wiped his brush and put it away before he responded. “Perhaps,” he ventured, “that’s why it is so beautiful—because it is beyond capturing.’’
    Sophie looked at him in surprise. “Maybe you’re right about that.” She laughed. “Maybe that’s what it is.’’ And to herself, she thought, How perceptive! And poetic!
    Mr. Oto laughed with her, but a rusty kind of laugh, as if it were something that he had forgotten how to do—if, indeed, he had ever known.
    “Some Sunday, perhaps we may walk over to the place where the river comes into the ocean and look most carefully at the sky,’’ he suggested.
    Sophie hesitated. “Then would I be able to paint it?” she asked, very seriously.
    “Perhaps not. But it would be a fine thing anyway.’’
    “Yes,” she finally agreed. “It would be a fine thing. I’d like to do that.’’
    Then, inexplicably, she looked full into his dark eyes. Mr. Oto, caught by surprise, could only gaze back at her. And neither of them looked away.
    Once again, when Sophie walked home from the riverfront, she felt his presence go along with her, and she smiled, both at that and at the absolute beauty of the sunny, clear morning. The breeze off the river, with its satisfying aromas of earth and sky and water. Her footsteps in time with the cries of a white gull high overhead and all the world breathing with her.
    W hat a dear, dear man!

Chapter Eleven
     
    When Mr. Oto walked back to his cottage from the river that day, he moved as lightly as if he traveled only along a silent path deep within. For after all, she was speaking openly with him now. With ease. Looking full into his face. Talking about herself without hesitation. Even saying that they could walk together to where the river and the ocean met. It was more than he could ever have hoped for.
    In the cottage, he propped up the nearly completed painting and studied it carefully. It was a good likeness of her, he thought. And the ease with which it had appeared! Almost as if it had leaped onto the paper, of its own choice. The image of Sophie sitting in the chair by the river, sunlight on her arms, and behind her—indistinct and dreamlike—the great crane stood with its wings extended and its soulful eye gazing at him.
    “What is it you are saying to me?” he asked the painting. Asked Sophie. Or the crane. Or both. But only the silence of the quiet cottage answered him.
    That afternoon, he sat outside in the sunshine, drinking tea and remembering over and over every single moment of a morning that had left him feeling—somehow, sad. But in a lovely and pensive way.
    “Mr. Oto! Mr. Oto!” Miss Anne’s voice broke through the tea-golden, sun-washed blue sky of his thoughts. The muffled sound of her running footsteps across the garden on the other side of the wall.
    Mr. Oto stood up immediately, because of a tone of distress, a note of urgency—perhaps even of fear—in her voice.
    “Miss Anne!” he answered, clattering his cup onto the seat of the chair and running to meet her at the gate in the back wall. She was breathless from her unaccustomed lope across the garden.
    “Oh, Mr. Oto,” she whispered. “Pearl Harbor —”
    “Pearl Harbor?” he repeated senselessly, suddenly