om this weird place, when I've had time to
think things out--"

"At your pleasure," he assented gently. "Only--don't let anything worry
you."

Impulsively she caught both his hands in a clasp at once soft and
strong, wholly straightforward and friendly.

"Do you know," she said in a laughing voice, her head thrown back, soft
shadows darkening her mystical eyes, the lamplight caressing her hair
until it was as if her head were framed in a halo of pure gold, bright
against the sombre background of that mean, bare room--"Do you know,
dear man, that you are quite, quite blind?"

"I think," he said with his twisted smile, "it would be well for me if I
were physically blind at this instant!"

She shook her head in light reproof.

"Blind, quite blind!" she repeated. "And yet--I'm glad it's so with you.
I wouldn't have you otherwise for worlds."

She withdrew her hand, took up the lamp, moved a little away from him,
and paused, holding his eyes.

"For Love, too, is blind," she said softly, with a quaint little nod of
affirmation. "Good night."

He started forward, eyes aflame; took a single pace after her; paused as
if against an unseen barrier. His hands dropped by his sides; his chin
to his chest; the light died out of his face and left it gray and deeply
lined.

In the hallway the lamp's glow receded, hesitated, began to ascend,
throwing upon the unpapered walls a distorted silhouette of the rude
balustrade; then disappeared, leaving the hall cold with empty darkness.

An inexplicable fit of trembling seized Whitaker. Dropping into a chair,
he pillowed his head on his folded arms. Presently the seizure passed,
but he remained moveless. With the drift of minutes, insensibly his taut
muscles relaxed. Odd visions painted the dark tapestries of his closed
eyes: a fragment of swinging seas shining in moonlight; white swords of
light slashing the dark night round their unseen eyrie; the throat of a
woman swelling firm and strong as a tower of ivory, tense from the
collar of her cheap gown to the point of her tilted chin; a shrieking,
swirling rabble of gulls seen against the fading sky, over the edge of a
cliff....

He slept.

Through the open doorway behind him and through the windows on either
hand drifted the sonorous song of the surf, a muted burden for the
stealthy disturbances of the night in being.

XVII

DISCOVERY

In time the discomfort of his posture wore through the wrappings of
slumber. H