lood
left her cheeks. Her blind eyes dilated fearfully. She stood petrified.
Then, with a long low cry--a cry of breathless rapture--she flung her
arms passionately round his neck. The life flowed back into her face; her
lovely smile just trembled on her parted lips; her breath came faint and
quick and fluttering. In soft tones of ecstasy, with her lips on his
cheek, she murmured the delicious words:

"Oh, Oscar! I know you once more!"

CHAPTER THE FIFTIETH

The End of the Journey

A LITTLE interval of time elapsed.

Her first exquisite sense of the recognition by touch had passed away.
Her mind had recovered its balance. She separated herself from Oscar, and
turned to me, with the one inevitable question which I knew must follow
the joining of their hands.

"What does it mean?"

The exposure of Nugent's perfidy; the revelation of the fatal secret of
Oscar's face; and, last not least, the defence of my own conduct towards
her, were all comprehended in the answer for which that question called.
As carefully, as delicately, as mercifully as I could, I disclosed to her
the whole truth. How the shock affected her, she did not tell me at the
time, and has never told me since. With her hand in Oscar's hand, with
her face hidden on Oscar's breast, she listened; not once interrupting
me, from first to last, by so much as a single word. Now and then, I saw
her tremble; now and then I heard her sigh heavily. That was all. It was
only when I had ended--it was only after a long interval during which
Oscar and I watched her in speechless anxiety--that she slowly lifted her
head and broke the silence.

"Thank God," we heard her say to herself fervently--"Thank God, I am
blind."

Those were her first words. They filled me with horror. I cried out to
her to recall them.

She quietly laid her head back on Oscar's breast.

"Why should I recall them?" she asked. "Do you think I wish to see him
disfigured as he is now? No! I wish to see him--and I _do_ see him!--as
my fancy drew his picture in the first days of our love. My blindness is
my blessing. It has given me back my old delightful sensation when I
touch him; it keeps my own beloved image of him--the one image I care
for--unchanged and unchangeable. You _will_ persist in thinking that my
happiness depends on my sight. I look back with horror at what I suffered
when I had my sight--my one effort is to forget that miserable time. Oh,
how little you know of me! Oh, wh