lips; but a horror of presuming on her gratitude kept him silent.

"Am I to go back ... to _him_?" she said, faintly.

"God forbid!" he blurted out. With all his keen eyesight, how could he
fail to see the adoration in her eyes, on her mute lips' quivering
curve, in every line of her body? But the brutality of asking for that
which her gratitude might not withhold froze him. It was no use; he
could not speak.

"Then--what? Tell me; I will do it," she said, in a desolate voice. "Of
course I cannot stay here now."

Something in his haggard face set her heart beating heavily; then for a
moment her heart seemed to stop. She covered her eyes with a swift
gesture.

"Is it pain?" he asked, quickly. "Let me see your eyes!" Her hands
covered them. He came to her; she stood up, and he drew her fingers from
her eyes and looked into them steadily. But what he saw there he alone
knows; for he bent closer, shaking in every limb; and both her arms
crept to his shoulders and her clasped hands tightened around his neck.

Which was doubtless an involuntary muscular affection incident on
successful operations for lamellar or zonular cataract.

* * * * *

That day they opened the steel box. She understood little of what he
read to her; presently he stopped abruptly in the middle of a sentence
and remained staring, reading on and on in absorbed silence.

Content, serene, numbed with her happiness, she watched him sleepily.

He muttered under his breath: "Sprowl! What a fool! What a cheap fool!
And yet not one among us even suspected him of _that_!"

After a long time he looked up at the girl, blankly at first, and with a
grimace of disgust. "You see," he said, and gave a curious laugh--"you
see that--that _you_ own all this land of ours--as far as I can make
out."

After a long explanation she partly understood, and laughed outright, a
clear child's laugh without a trace of that sad undertone he knew so
well.

"But we are not going to take it away from your club--are we?" she
asked.

"No," he said; "let the club have the land--_your_ land! What do we
care? We will never come here again!" He sat a moment, thinking, then
sprang up. "We will go to New York to-morrow," he said; "and I'll just
step out and say good-bye to Sprowl--I think he and his wife are also
going to-morrow; I think they're going to Europe, _to live_! I'm sure
they are; and that they will never come back."

And, curiously en