very sunburn seemed an essential quality rather than an accident of the country in which he lived; a man, too, who came to the wild, uncitied places of the world with the joy of one who comes into an inheritance; a man to whom these desolate tracts were home, and the fireside and the hedged fields and made roads merely the other places; and he understood the magnitude of the calamity which had befallen him. Therefore he was most anxious to know more of this girl who wrote to Durrance from Donegal, and to gather from her letters, as from a mirror in which her image was reflected, some speculation as to her character. For if she failed, what had this friend of his any longer left?
'You would like to hear them, I expect,' he insisted. 'You have been away eight weeks.' And he was interrupted by a harsh laugh.
'Do you know what I was thinking when I stopped you?' said Durrance. 'Why, that I would read the letters after you had gone. It takes time to get used to being blind after your eyes have served you pretty well all your life.' And his voice shook ever so little. 'You will have to help me to answer them, Calder. So read them. Please read them.'
Calder tore open the envelopes and read the letters through and was satisfied. They gave a record of the simple doings of her mountain village in Donegal, and in the simplest terms. But the girl's nature shone out in the telling. Her love of the country-side and of the people who dwelt there was manifest. She could see the humour and the tragedy of the small village troubles. There was a warm friendliness for Durrance moreover expressed, not so much in a sentence as in the whole spirit of the letters. It was evident that she was most keenly interested in all that he did; that, in a way, she looked upon his career as a thing in which she had a share, even if it was only a friend's share. And when Calder had ended he looked again at Durrance, but now with a face of relief. It seemed, too, that Durrance was relieved.
'After all, one has something to be thankful for,' he cried. 'Think! Suppose that I had been engaged to her! She would never have allowed me to break it off, once I had gone blind. What an escape!'
'An escape?' exclaimed Calder.
'You don't understand. But I knew a man who went blind; a good fellow, too, before-mind that, before! But a year after! You couldn't have recognised him. He had narrowed down into the most selfish, exacting, egotistical creature it is possible to imagine. I don't wonder; I hardly see how he could help it; I don't blame him. But it wouldn't make life easier for a wife, would it? A helpless husband who can't cross a road without his wife at his elbow is bad enough. But make him a selfish beast into the bargain, full of questions, jealous of her power to go where she will, curious as to every person with whom she speaks-and what then? My God, I am glad that girl refused me. For that I am most grateful.'
'She refused you?' asked Calder, and the relief passed from his face and voice.
'Twice,' said Durrance. 'What an escape! You see, Calder, I shall be more trouble even than the man I told you of. I am not clever. I can't sit in a chair and amuse myself by thinking, not having any intellect to buck about. I have lived out of doors and hard, and that's the only sort of life that suits me. I tell you, Calder, you won't be very anxious for much of my society in a year's time,' and he laughed again and with the same harshness.
'Oh, stop that,' said Calder; 'I will read the rest of your letters to you.'
He read them, however, without much attention to their contents. His mind was occupied with the two letters from Ethne Eustace, and he was wondering whether there was any deeper emotion than mere friendship hidden beneath the words. Girls refused men for all sorts of queer reasons which had no sense in them, and very often they were sick and sorry about it afterwards; and very often they meant to accept the men all the time.
'I must answer the letters from Ireland,' said Durrance, when he had finished. 'The rest can wait.'
Calder held a sheet of paper upon the desk and told Durrance when he was writing on a slant and when he was writing on the blotting-pad; and in this way Durrance wrote to tell Ethne that a sunstroke had deprived him of his sight. Calder took that letter away. But he took it to the hospital and asked for the Syrian doctor. The doctor came out to him, and they walked together under the trees in front of the building.
'Tell me the truth,' said Calder.
The doctor blinked behind his spectacles.
'The optic nerve is, I think, destroyed,' he replied.
'Then there is no hope?'
'None, if my diagnosis is correct.'
Calder turned the letter over and over, as though he could not make up his mind what in the world to do with it.
'Can a sunstroke destroy the optic nerve?' he asked at length.
'A mere sunstroke? No,' replied the doctor. 'But it may be the occasion. For the cause one must look deeper.'
Calder came to a stop, and there was a look of horror in his eyes. 'You mean-one must look to the brain?'
'Yes.'
They walked on for a few paces. A further question was in Calder's mind, but he had some difficulty in speaking it, and when he had spoken he waited for the answer in suspense.
'Then this calamity is not all. There will be more to follow-death or-' but that other alternative he could not bring himself to utter. Here, however, the doctor was able to reassure him.
'No. That does not follow.'
Calder went back to the mess-room and called for a brandy-and-soda. He was more disturbed by the blow which had fallen upon Durrance than he would have cared to own; and he put the letter upon the table and thought of the message of renunciation which it contained, and he could hardly restrain his fingers from tearing it across. It must be sent, he knew; its destruction would be of no more than a temporary avail. Yet he could hardly bring himself to post it. With the passage of every minute he realised more clearly what blindness meant to Durrance. A man not very clever, as he himself was ever the first to acknowledge, and always the inheritor of the other places, — how much more it meant to him than to the ordinary run of men! Would the girl, he wondered, understand as clearly? It was very silent that morning on the verandah at Wadi Halfa; the sunlight blazed upon desert and river; not a breath of wind stirred the foliage of any bush. Calder drank his brandy-and-soda, and slowly that question forced itself more and more into the front of his mind. Would the woman over in Ireland understand? He rose from his chair as he heard Colonel Dawson's voice in the mess-room, and taking up his letter, walked away to the post-office. Durrance's letter was despatched, but somewhere in the Mediterranean it crossed a letter from Ethne, which Durrance received a fortnight later at Cairo. It was read out to him by Calder, who had obtained leave to come down from Wadi Halfa with his friend. Ethne wrote that she had, during the last months, considered all that he had said when at Glenalla and in London; she had read, too, his letters and understood that in his thoughts of her there had been no change, and that there would be none; she therefore went back upon her old argument that she would, by marriage, be doing him an injury, and she would marry him upon his return to England.
'That's rough luck, isn't it?' said Durrance, when Calder had read the letter through. 'For here's the one thing I have always wished for, and it comes when I can no longer take it.'
'I think you will find it very difficult to refuse to take it,' said Calder. 'I do not know Miss Eustace, but I can hazard a guess from the letters of hers which I have read to you. I do not think that she is a woman who will say 'yes' one day, and then because bad times come to you say 'no' the next, or allow you to say 'no' for her, either. I have a sort of notion that since she cares for you and you for her, you are doing little less than insulting her if you imagine that she cannot marry you and still be happy.'
Durrance thought over that aspect of the question, and began to wonder. Calder might be right. Marriage with a blind man! It might, perhaps, be possible if upon both sides there was love, and the letter from Ethne proved-did it not? — that on both sides there was love. Besides, there were some trivial compensations which might help to make her sacrifice less burdensome. She could still live in her own country and move in her own home. For the Lennon house could be rebuilt and the estates cleared of their debt.
'Besides,' said Calder, 'there is always a possibility of a cure.'
'There is no such possibility,' said Durrance, with a decision which quite startled his companion. 'You know that as well as I do;' and he added with a laugh, 'You needn't start so guiltily. I haven't overheard a word of any of your conversations about me.'
'Then what in the world makes you think that there's no chance?'
'The voice of every doctor who has encouraged me to hope. Their words-yes-their words tell me to visit
