n the wilderness rushed back over
her. She was angry at the memories they brought her, and doubly angry at
Lawrence, as if he only were responsible.

"It's inconceivable," she said calmly, "that you, without seeing, can
really carve anything true to form and line." In her voice was
incredulity and unbelief.

He rose suddenly, his face white, and said, with an intensity that
startled her: "That sentiment is as familiar to me as my name. I have
heard it from sight-bigoted people from the days when I made my first
attempt to go back to my school work. I am rather weary of it."

She sat staring at him for a moment, then she laughed. She could not
have told why she did it, and she was instantly sorry. The blood rushed
to his face.

"I shall create that which will forever assure you that I can carve true
to the most familiar form and line you know," he said fiercely.

Her face was as crimson as his now, though she felt ice cold.

"What do you mean?" she demanded, her voice unsteady.

He laughed bitterly. In his own heart a fierce volcanic surge was raging
which he did not attempt to control.

"Do you think that I, trained as I am to gather fact from touch, could
carry you through weeks of hell in my arms, against my breast, and not
know you, you as you are, Claire Barkley? I shall carve you, you with
your cold reserve suppressing the emotional chaos within you, and you
will not fail to recognize yourself."

Claire gripped the chair arms. Anger, fear, doubt, then the knowledge
that he could do as he said, swept over her in rapidly succeeding waves,
and gathered at last into a steel hate that she felt must last through
eternity.

"You, you would do that, after I guided you here! You would take
advantage of what I could not help, and--and--" she choked, and then
said swiftly--"so, under your indifferent exterior you used your touch
that way these days! Oh, you--you beast!"

Lawrence laughed coolly. "I could no more help it than I can avoid being
here."

"Lies!" she exclaimed. "A gentleman could help it!"

"Perhaps, but not an artist."

"And what of beauty, of your boasted purity of art, is there in that?"

"All," he said calmly. "If you knew, oh, if I could make you see what
every artist knows"--he was talking passionately now, his face illumined
in spite of his blind eyes--"you would realize, that I could not help
it, that I glory in it, and that it was and is the way of art."

He rose and walked the floor,