ld's eyes! ... He would
think about them no more.

All his life Francis had been a sworn opponent of worry. When anything
disagreeable threatened, his mode of procedure was to shrug his
shoulders, and immediately divert his thoughts. "Leave the thing alone;
don't bother about it; it will probably come all right in the end!"
Such was his theory, and experience had proved that as often as not it
was correct. He endeavoured to cultivate the same attitude towards his
boy, but in vain. The anxiety recurred.

He told himself that he would have the eyes tested, and satisfy himself
once for all; but once and again his courage failed, and the days passed
on, and nothing was done. Then there came an evening when suddenly fear
engulfed him, and made anything seem easier than a continuation of
suspense.

He was holding the child in his arms, and he rose and carried it across
the room, to where a powerful light hung from the wall. He pushed aside
the shade, and held the tiny face closely approaching the glass. The
eyes stared on, unblinking and still. A great cry burst from Francis'
throat:

"My God!" he cried. "The boy is blind!"

The boy was blind, and there was no hope that he would ever possess his
sight. Mrs Manning wept herself ill, but even in the depths of her
distress she realised that her husband's sufferings were keener than her
own. It gave an added touch of misery to those black days, to feel a
strange new distance between her husband and herself. She could not
comfort him; she could not understand him; after ten years of married
life it appeared as if the man she had known had disappeared, and a
stranger had taken his place. Yet there was nothing unmanly in his
grief; he was quiet and self-restrained as she had never seen him
before, gentler, and more considerate of others.

The poor woman noticed the change with awe, and wondered if Francis were
going to die.

"I have never seen you feel anything as you are feeling this," she said
to him one night. They were sitting by the dying fire, and Francis
raised his head and stared at her with sombre eyes.

"But I have felt nothing," he said flatly. "I am finding that out. I
did not know what it meant to feel!"

From the moment of his discovery of the blindness of his son, Francis
Manning became a man possessed of but one aim--to lighten and alleviate,
so far as was humanly possible, the child's sad lot. He taught himself
Braille, so that in time