was
funereal, she saw nothing; that of Gwynplaine sinister, he saw all
things. For Dea creation never passed the bounds of touch and hearing;
reality was bounded, limited, short, immediately lost. Nothing was
infinite to her but darkness. For Gwynplaine to live was to have the
crowd for ever before him and outside him. Dea was the proscribed from
light, Gwynplaine the banned of life. They were beyond the pale of hope,
and had reached the depth of possible calamity; they had sunk into it,
both of them. An observer who had watched them would have felt his
reverie melt into immeasurable pity. What must they not have suffered!
The decree of misfortune weighed visibly on these human creatures, and
never had fate encompassed two beings who had done nothing to deserve
it, and more clearly turned destiny into torture, and life into hell.

They were in a Paradise.

They were in love.

Gwynplaine adored Dea. Dea idolized Gwynplaine.

"How beautiful you are!" she would say to him.

CHAPTER III.

"OCULOS NON HABET, ET VIDET."

Only one woman on earth saw Gwynplaine. It was the blind girl. She had
learned what Gwynplaine had done for her, from Ursus, to whom he had
related his rough journey from Portland to Weymouth, and the many
sufferings which he had endured when deserted by the gang. She knew that
when an infant dying upon her dead mother, suckling a corpse, a being
scarcely bigger than herself had taken her up; that this being, exiled,
and, as it were, buried under the refusal of the universe to aid him,
had heard her cry; that all the world being deaf to him, he had not been
deaf to her; that the child, alone, weak, cast off, without
resting-place here below, dragging himself over the waste, exhausted by
fatigue, crushed, had accepted from the hands of night a burden, another
child: that he, who had nothing to expect in that obscure distribution
which we call fate, had charged himself with a destiny; that naked, in
anguish and distress, he had made himself a Providence; that when Heaven
had closed he had opened his heart; that, himself lost, he had saved;
that having neither roof-tree nor shelter, he had been an asylum; that
he had made himself mother and nurse; that he who was alone in the world
had responded to desertion by adoption; that lost in the darkness he had
given an example; that, as if not already sufficiently burdened, he had
added to his load another's misery; that in this world, which seemed to