As
long as it's only you. I'm just going up here and throw it under the
bed. Oh, yes, certainly."

Boaz ate no supper. For the first time in his life food was dry in
his gullet. Even under those other successive crushing blows of Fate
the full and generous habit of his functionings had carried on
unabated; he had always eaten what was set before him. To-night,
over his untouched plate, he watched Manuel with his sightless eyes,
keeping track of his every mouthful, word, intonation, breath. What
profit he expected to extract from this catlike surveillance it is
impossible to say.

When they arose from the supper-table Boaz made another Herculean
effort. "Manuel, you're a good boy!"

The formula had a quality of appeal, of despair, and of command.

"Manuel, you should be short of money, maybe. Look, what's this? A
tenner? Well, there's a piece for the pocket; go and enjoy yourself."

He would have been frightened had Manuel, upsetting tradition,
declined the offering. With the morbid contrariness of the human
imagination, the boy's avid grasping gave him no comfort.

He went out into the shop, where it was already dark, drew to him
his last, his tools, mallets, cutters, pegs, leather. And having
prepared to work, he remained idle. He found himself listening.

It has been observed that the large phenomena of sunlight and
darkness were nothing to Boaz Negro. A busy night was broad day. Yet
there was a difference; he knew it with the blind man's eyes, the
ears.

Day was a vast confusion, or rather a wide fabric, of sounds; great
and little sounds all woven together, voices, footfalls, wheels,
far-off whistles and foghorns, flies buzzing in the sun. Night was
another thing. Still there were voices and footfalls, but rarer,
emerging from the large, pure body of silence as definite, surprising,
and yet familiar entities.

To-night there was an easterly wind, coming off the water and
carrying the sound of waves. So far as other fugitive sounds were
concerned it was the same as silence. The wind made little
difference to the ears. It nullified, from one direction at least,
the other two visual processes of the blind, the sense of touch and
the sense of smell. It blew away from the shop, toward the
living-house.

As has been said, Boaz found himself listening, scrutinizing with an
extraordinary attention, this immense background of sound. He heard
footfalls. The story of that night was written, for him, in footfalls