ooking at you now."

"Yes, yes, but so strangely, and not in my eyes."

"I cannot look into your eyes, because, Hugh, I am blind." Her hand went
further out towards him.

He took it silently and pressed it to his bosom as he saw that she spoke
true; and the shadow of the thing fell on him. The hand held to his
breast felt how he was trembling from the shock.

"Sit down, Hugh," she said, "and I will tell you all; but do not hold my
hand so, or I cannot."

Sitting there face to face, with deep furrows growing in his
countenance, and a quiet sorrow spreading upon her cheek and forehead,
she told the story how, since her childhood, her sight had played
her false now and then, and within the past month had grown steadily
uncertain. "And now," she said at last, "I am blind. I think I should
like to tell my father--if you please. Then when I have seen him and
poor Angers, if you will come again! There is work to be done. I hoped
it would be finished before this came; but--there, good friend, go; I
will sit here quietly."

She could not see his face, but she heard him say: "My love, my love,"
very softly, as he rose to go; and she smiled sadly to herself. She
folded her hands in her lap, and thought, not bitterly, not listlessly,
but deeply. She wanted to consider all cheerfully now; she tried to do
so. She was musing among those flying perceptions, those nebulous facts
of a new life, experienced for the first time; she was now not herself
as she had been; another woman was born; and she was feeling carefully
along the unfamiliar paths which she must tread. She was not glad that
these words ran through her mind continuously at first:

"A land of darkness as darkness itself, and of the shadow of
death without any order, and where the light is darkness."

Her brave nature rose against the moody spirit which sought to take
possession of her, and she cried out in her heart valiantly: "But there
is order, there is order. I shall feel things as they ought to be. I
think I could tell now what was true and what was false in man or woman;
it would be in their presence not in their faces."

She stopped speaking. She heard footsteps. Her father entered. Hugh
Tryon had done his task gently, but the old planter, selfish and hard as
he was, loved his daughter; and the meeting was bitter for him. The
prop of his pride seemed shaken beyond recovery. But the girl's calm
comforted them all, and poignancy became dull pain. Bef