Irene listened too.

"Ply hears somebody," she said. And then she had all but said "Look at
him!" in an unguarded moment.

An instant later the dog had started up and scoured from the room as if
life and death depended on his presence elsewhere. Adrian heard
something his sister did not, and exclaimed "What's that?"

"Nothing," said Irene. "Only someone at the front-door. Ply's always
like that."

"I didn't mean Ply. Listen! Be quiet." The room they were in was remote
from the front-door of the house, and the voice they heard was no more
than a musical modulation of silence. It had a power in it, for all
that, to rouse the blind man to excitement. He had to put a restraint on
himself to say quietly:--"Suppose you go and see! Do you mind?" Irene
left the room.

Anyone who had seen Adrian then for the first time, and watched him
standing motionless with his hands on a chairback and the eyes that saw
nothing gazing straight in front of him, but not towards the door, would
have wondered to see a man of his type apparently so interested in his
own image, repeated by the mirror before him as often as eyesight could
trace its give-and-take with the one that faced it on the wall behind
him. He was the wrong man for a Narcissus. The strength of his framework
was wrong throughout. Narcissus had no bone-distances, as artists say,
and his hair was in crisp curls, good for the sculptor. No one ever
needed to get a pair of scissors to snip it. But though anyone might
have marvelled at Adrian Torrens's seeming Narcissus-like intentness on
his own manifold image, he could never have surmised that cruel
blindness was its apology. He could never have guessed, from anything in
their seeming, that the long perspective of gazing orbs, vanishing into
nothingness, were not more sightless than their originals.

He only listened for a moment. For, distant as she was, Irene's cry of
surprise on meeting some new-comer was decisive as to that new-comer's
identity. It could be no one but Gwen. Irene's welcome settled that.

The blind man was feeling his way to the door when Gwen opened it. Then
she was in his arms, and what cared he for anything else in the heavens
above or the earth beneath? His exultation had to die down, like the
resonant chords in the music he had played an hour since, before he
could come to the level of speech. Then he said prosaically:--"This is
very irregular! How about the solemn compact? How are we going to look
o