r tonic," she
added, and she busied herself with giving it to him. "As soon as you
have taken it, I'm going for a walk, so you must make up your mind to
have some sleep."

"Am I to be left alone?" he asked, with an assumed grievance in his
voice.

"Madame Bulteel will stay with you," she replied.

"Do you need a walk so very badly?" he asked presently.

"I don't suppose I need it, but I want it," she answered. "My feet and
the earth are very friendly."

"Where do you walk?" he asked.

"Just anywhere," was her reply. "Sometimes up the river, sometimes down,
sometimes miles away in the woods."

"Do you never take a gun with you?"

"Of course," she answered, nodding, as though he could see. "I get wild
pigeons and sometimes a wild duck or a prairie-hen."

"That's right," he remarked; "that's right."

"I don't believe in walking just for the sake of walking," she
continued. "It doesn't do you any good, but if you go for something and
get it, that's what puts the mind and the body right."

Suddenly his face grew grave. "Yes, that's it," he remarked.

"To go for something you want, a long way off. You don't feel the fag
when you're thinking of the thing at the end; but you've got to have the
thing at the end, to keep making for it, or there's no good going--none
at all. That's life; that's how it is. It's no good only walking--you've
got to walk somewhere. It's no good simply going--you've got to go
somewhere. You've got to fight for something. That's why, when they take
the something you fight for away--when they break you and cripple you,
and you can't go anywhere for what you want badly, life isn't worth
living."

An anxious look came into her face. This was the first time, since
recovering consciousness, that he had referred, even indirectly, to all
that had happened. She understood him well--ah, terribly well! It was
the tragedy of the man stopped in his course because of one mistake,
though he had done ten thousand wise things. The power taken from his
hands, the interrupted life, the dark future, the beginning again, if
ever his sight came back: it was sickening, heartbreaking.

She saw it all in his face, but as if some inward voice had spoken to
him, his face cleared, the swift-moving hands clasped in front of him,
and he said quietly: "But because it's life, there it is. You have to
take it as it comes."

He stopped a moment, and in the pause she reached out her hand with a
sudden passionate gest