on like a lecturer," groaned Flambeau; "put it in a few
words."

"I can put it in one word," answered his friend.

Miss Joan Stacey skewered her business-like black hat on to her head
with a business-like black frown before a little mirror, and, as the
conversation proceeded, took her handbag and umbrella in an unhurried
style, and left the room.

"The truth is one word, and a short one," said Father Brown. "Pauline
Stacey was blind."

"Blind!" repeated Flambeau, and rose slowly to his whole huge stature.

"She was subject to it by blood," Brown proceeded. "Her sister would
have started eyeglasses if Pauline would have let her; but it was her
special philosophy or fad that one must not encourage such diseases by
yielding to them. She would not admit the cloud; or she tried to dispel
it by will. So her eyes got worse and worse with straining; but the
worst strain was to come. It came with this precious prophet, or
whatever he calls himself, who taught her to stare at the hot sun with
the naked eye. It was called accepting Apollo. Oh, if these new pagans
would only be old pagans, they would be a little wiser! The old pagans
knew that mere naked Nature-worship must have a cruel side. They knew
that the eye of Apollo can blast and blind."

There was a pause, and the priest went on in a gentle and even broken
voice. "Whether or no that devil deliberately made her blind, there is
no doubt that he deliberately killed her through her blindness. The very
simplicity of the crime is sickening. You know he and she went up and
down in those lifts without official help; you know also how smoothly
and silently the lifts slide. Kalon brought the lift to the girl's
landing, and saw her, through the open door, writing in her slow,
sightless way the will she had promised him. He called out to her
cheerily that he had the lift ready for her, and she was to come out
when she was ready. Then he pressed a button and shot soundlessly up to
his own floor, walked through his own office, out on to his own balcony,
and was safely praying before the crowded street when the poor girl,
having finished her work, ran gaily out to where lover and lift were to
receive her, and stepped--"

"Don't!" cried Flambeau.

"He ought to have got half a million by pressing that button," continued
the little father, in the colourless voice in which he talked of such
horrors. "But that went smash. It went smash because there happened
to be another person w