ears. They did not penetrate to her mind, for as she
looked across the stone-flagged terrace and down the broad shallow
flight of steps to the lawn, she asked abruptly:--

"Do you think he has any hope whatever that he will recover his sight?"

The question had not occurred to Mrs. Adair before, and she gave to it
now no importance in her thoughts.

"Would he travel up to town so often to see his oculist if he had
none?" she asked in reply. "Of course he hopes."

"I am afraid," said Ethne, and she turned with a sudden movement towards
her friend. "Haven't you noticed how quick he has grown and is growing?
Quick to interpret your silences, to infer what you do not say from what
you do, to fill out your sentences, to make your movements the
commentary of your words? Laura, haven't you noticed? At times I think
the very corners of my mind are revealed to him. He reads me like a
child's lesson book."

"Yes," said Mrs. Adair, "you are at a disadvantage. You no longer have
your face to screen your thoughts."

"And his eyes no longer tell me anything at all," Ethne added.

There was truth in both remarks. So long as Durrance had had Ethne's
face with its bright colour and her steady, frank, grey eyes visible
before him, he could hardly weigh her intervals of silence and her
movements against her spoken words with the detachment which was now
possible to him. On the other hand, whereas before she had never been
troubled by a doubt as to what he meant or wished, or intended, now she
was often in the dark. Durrance's blindness, in a word, had produced an
effect entirely opposite to that which might have been expected. It had
reversed their positions.

Mrs. Adair, however, was more interested in Ethne's unusual burst of
confidence. There was no doubt of it, she reflected. The girl, once
remarkable for a quiet frankness of word and look, was declining into a
creature of shifts and agitation.

"There is something, then, to be concealed from him?" she asked
quietly.

"Yes."

"Something rather important?"

"Something which at all costs I must conceal," Ethne exclaimed, and was
not sure, even while she spoke, that Durrance had not already found it
out. She stepped over the threshold of the window on to the terrace. In
front of her the lawn stretched to a hedge; on the far side of that
hedge a couple of grass fields lifted and fell in gentle undulations;
and beyond the fields she could see amongst a cluster of trees the