are that should be taken, and replaced
the bandages on the eyes. It was, however, long before Ingolby was
restored to consciousness, and when it came, Rockwell put to his lips
a cooling drink containing a powerful opiate. Ingolby drank it without
protest and in silence. He was like one whose sense of life was
automatic and of an inner rather than an outer understanding. But when
he lay back on the pillow again, he said slowly:

"I want the Chief Constable to come here to-night at eight o'clock. It
will be dark then. He must come. It is important. Will you see to it,
Rockwell?"

He thrust out a hand as though to find Rockwell's, and there was a
gratitude and an appeal in the pressure of his fingers which went to
Rockwell's heart.

"All right, Chief. I'll have him here," Rockwell answered briskly, but
with tears standing in his eyes. Ingolby had, as it were, been stricken
out of the active, sentient, companionable world into a world where
he was alone, detached, solitary. His being seemed suspended in an
atmosphere of misery and helplessness.

"Blind! I am blind!" That was the phrase which kept beating with the
pulses in Ingolby's veins, that throbbed, and throbbed, and throbbed
like engines in a creaking ship which the storm was shaking and pounding
in the vast seas between the worlds. Here was the one incomprehensible,
stupefying fact: nothing else mattered. Every plan he had ever had,
every design which he had made his own by an originality that even his
foes acknowledged, were passing before his brain in swift procession,
shining, magnified, and magnificent, and in that sudden clear-seeing
of his soul he beheld their full value, their exact concrete force
and ultimate effect. Yet he knew himself detached from them, inactive,
incapable, because he could not see with the eyes of the body. The great
essential thing to him was that one thing he had lost. A man might be a
cripple and still direct the great concerns of life and the business of
life. He might be shorn of limb and scarred of body, but with eye sight
still direct the courses of great schemes, in whatever sphere of life
his purposes were at work. He might be deaf to every sound and forever
dumb, but seeing enabled him still to carry forward every enterprise.
In darkness, however, those things were naught, because judgment must
depend on the eyes and senses of others. The report might be true or
false, the deputy might deceive, and his blind chief might neve