erced, and
the sight is irrecoverably gone, there was very little damage done to
surrounding parts, and the brain is quite uninjured. The present danger
arises from the shock to the nervous system and from the extreme mental
anguish caused by the realisation of his loss. The physical suffering
during the first days and nights must have been terrible. Poor fellow,
he looks shattered by it. But his constitution is excellent, and his
life has been so clean, healthy, and normal, that he had every chance
of making a good recovery, were it not that as the pain abated and his
blindness became more a thing to be daily and hourly realised, his
mental torture was so excessive. Sight has meant so infinitely much to
him,--beauty of form, beauty of colour. The artist in him was so
all-pervading. They tell me he said very little. He is a brave man and
a strong one. But his temperature began to vary alarmingly; he showed
symptoms of mental trouble, of which I need not give you technical
details; and a nerve specialist seemed more necessary than an oculist.
Therefore he is now in my hands."

The doctor paused, straightened a few books lying on the table, and
drew a small bowl of violets closer to him. He studied these
attentively for a few moments, then put them back where his wife had
placed them and went on speaking.

"I am satisfied on the whole. He needed a friendly voice to penetrate
the darkness. He needed a hand to grasp his, in faithful comprehension.
He did not want pity, and those who talked of his loss without
understanding it, or being able to measure its immensity, maddened him.
He needed a fellow-man to come to him and say: 'It is a fight--an
awful, desperate fight. But by God's grace you will win through to
victory. It would be far easier to die; but to die would be to lose;
you must live to win. It is utterly beyond all human strength; but by
God's grace you will come through conqueror.' All this I said to him,
Jeanette, and a good deal more; and then a strangely beautiful thing
happened. I can tell you, and of course I could tell Flower, but to no
one else on earth would I repeat it. The difficulty had been to obtain
from him any response whatever. He did not seem able to rouse
sufficiently to notice anything going on around him. But those words,
'by God's grace,' appeared to take hold of him and find immediate echo
in his inner consciousness. I heard him repeat them once or twice, and
then change them to 'with the a