the woman who had been his faithful friend over so
many years. At an engagement a month before, Tynemouth had been blinded
by shrapnel, and had been sent to Durban. To the two letters he had
written there had come no answer until now; and he felt that this reply
would be a plaint against Fate, a rebellion against the future
restraint and trial and responsibility which would be put upon the
wife, who was so much of the irresponsible world.

After a moment, however, he muttered a reproach against his own
darkness of spirit and his lack of faith in her womanliness, and opened
the envelope.

It was not the letter he had imagined and feared. It began by thanking
him for his own letter, and then it plunged into the heart of her
trouble:

".... Tynie is blind. He will never see again. But his face seems to me
quite beautiful. It shines, Ian: beauty comes from within. Poor old
Tynie, who would have thought that the world he loved couldn't make
that light in his face! I never saw it there--did you? It is just
giving up one's self to the Inevitable. I suppose we mostly are giving
up ourselves to Ourselves, thinking always of our own pleasure and
profit and pride, never being content, pushing on and on.... Ian, I'm
not going to push on any more. I've done with the Climbers. There's too
much of the Climbers in us all--not social climbing, I mean, but
wanting to get somewhere that has something for us, out in the big
material world. When I look at Tynie--he's lying there so peaceful--you
might think it is a prison he is in. It isn't. He's set free into a
world where he had never been. He's set free in a world of light that
never blinds us. If he'd lived to be a hundred with the sight of his
eyes, he'd never have known that there's a world that belongs to
Allah,--I love that word, it sounds so great and yet so friendly, so
gentler than the name by which we call the First One in our language
and our religion--and that world is inside ourselves.... Tynie is
always thinking of other people now, wondering what they are doing and
how they are doing it. He was talking about you a little while ago, and
so admiringly. It brought the tears to my eyes. Oh, I am so glad, Ian,
that our friendship has always been so much on the surface, so 'void of
offence'--is that the phrase? I can look at it without wincing; and I
am glad. It never was a thing of importance to you, for I am not
important, and there was no weight of life in it or in me. Bu