tters from Ireland," said Durrance, when he had
finished. "The rest can wait."

Calder held a sheet of paper upon the desk and told Durrance when he was
writing on a slant and when he was writing on the blotting-pad; and in
this way Durrance wrote to tell Ethne that a sunstroke had deprived him
of his sight. Calder took that letter away. But he took it to the
hospital and asked for the Syrian doctor. The doctor came out to him,
and they walked together under the trees in front of the building.

"Tell me the truth," said Calder.

The doctor blinked behind his spectacles.

"The optic nerve is, I think, destroyed," he replied.

"Then there is no hope?"

"None, if my diagnosis is correct."

Calder turned the letter over and over, as though he could not make up
his mind what in the world to do with it.

"Can a sunstroke destroy the optic nerve?" he asked at length.

"A mere sunstroke? No," replied the doctor. "But it may be the
occasion. For the cause one must look deeper."

Calder came to a stop, and there was a look of horror in his eyes. "You
mean--one must look to the brain?"

"Yes."

They walked on for a few paces. A further question was in Calder's mind,
but he had some difficulty in speaking it, and when he had spoken he
waited for the answer in suspense.

"Then this calamity is not all. There will be more to follow--death
or--" but that other alternative he could not bring himself to utter.
Here, however, the doctor was able to reassure him.

"No. That does not follow."

Calder went back to the mess-room and called for a brandy-and-soda. He
was more disturbed by the blow which had fallen upon Durrance than he
would have cared to own; and he put the letter upon the table and
thought of the message of renunciation which it contained, and he could
hardly restrain his fingers from tearing it across. It must be sent, he
knew; its destruction would be of no more than a temporary avail. Yet he
could hardly bring himself to post it. With the passage of every minute
he realised more clearly what blindness meant to Durrance. A man not
very clever, as he himself was ever the first to acknowledge, and always
the inheritor of the other places,--how much more it meant to him than
to the ordinary run of men! Would the girl, he wondered, understand as
clearly? It was very silent that morning on the verandah at Wadi Halfa;
the sunlight blazed upon desert and river; not a breath of wind stirred
the foliage of any bu