till I saw the
dark round spots of her eyes. If it was a strange night for the others,
it was stranger still to her.

The wind and the rain beat on Minister Malden's bended back. He loved it
that way. The missionary was praying for the soul of the heathen.

NONE SO BLIND[21]

[Note 21: Copyright 1917, by Harper and Brothers. Copyright 1918, by
Mary Synon.]

BY MARY SYNON

From _Harper's Magazine_.

We were listening to Leila Burton's music--her husband, and Dick
Allport, and I--with the throb of London beating under us like the surge
of an ocean in anger, when there rose above the smooth harmonies of the
piano and the pulsing roar of the night a sound more poignant than them
both, the quavering melody of a street girl's song.

Through the purpling twilight of that St. John's Eve I had been drifting
in dreams while Leila had gone from golden splendors of chords which
reflected the glow on westward-fronting windows into somber symphonies
which had seemed to make vocal the turbulent soul of the city--for Dick
Allport and I were topping the structure of that house of life that was
to shelter the love we had long been cherishing. With Leila playing in
that art which had dowered her with fame, I was visioning the glory of
such love as she and Standish Burton gave each other while I watched
Dick, sensing rather than seeing the dearness of him as he gave to the
mounting climaxes the tense interest he always tendered to Leila's
music.

I had known, before I came to love Dick Allport, other loves and other
lovers. Because I had followed will-o'-the-wisps of fancy through
marshes of sentiment I could appreciate the more the truth of that flame
which he and I had lighted for our guidance on the road. A moody boy he
had been when I first met him, full of a boy's high chivalry and of a
boy's dark despairs. A moody man he had become in the years that had
denied him the material success toward which he had striven; but
something in the patience of his efforts, something in the fineness of
his struggle had endeared him to me as no triumph could have done.
Because he needed me, because I had come to believe that I meant to him
belief in the ultimate good of living, as well as belief in womanhood, I
cherished in my soul that love of him which yearned over him even as it
longed for him.

Watching him in the dusk while he lounged in that concentrated quiet of
attention, I went on piling the bricks of that wide house of