p.

"Can you always trust your eyes, even in broad daylight?" she burst out.
"How often do they deceive you, in the simplest things? What did I hear
you all disputing about the other day in the garden? You were looking at
some view?"

"Yes--at the view down the alley of trees at the other end of the
churchyard wall."

"Some object in the alley had attracted general notice--had it not?"

"Yes--an object at the further end of it."

"I heard you up here. You all differed in opinion, in spite of your
wonderful eyes. My father said it moved. You said it stood still. Oscar
said it was a man. Mrs. Finch said it was a calf. Nugent ran off, and
examined this amazing object at close quarters. And what did it turn out
to be? A stump of an old tree blown across the road in the night! Why am
I to envy people the possession of a sense which plays them such tricks
as that? No! no! Herr Grosse is going to 'cut into my cataracts,' as he
calls it--because I am going to be married to a man I love; and I fancy,
like a fool, I may love him better still, if I can see him. I may be
quite wrong," she added archly. "It may end in my not loving him half as
well as I do now!"

I thought of Oscar's face, and felt a sickening fear that she might be
speaking far more seriously than she suspected. I tried to change the
subject. No! Her imaginative nature had found its way into a new region
of speculation before I could open my lips.

"I associate light," she said thoughtfully, "with all that is beautiful
and heavenly--and dark with all that is vile and horrible and devilish. I
wonder how light and dark will look to me when I see?"

"I believe they will astonish you," I answered, "by being entirely unlike
what you fancy them to be now."

She started. I had alarmed her without intending it.

"Will Oscar's face be utterly unlike what I fancy it to be now?" she
asked, in suddenly altered tones. "Do you mean to say that I have not had
the right image of him in my mind all this time?"

I tried again to draw her off to another topic. What more could I
do--with my tongue tied by the German's warning to us not to agitate her,
in the face of the operation to be performed on the next day?

It was quite useless. She went on, as before, without heeding me.

"Have I no means of judging rightly what Oscar is like?" she said. "I
touch my own face; I know how long it is and how broad it is; I know how
big the different features are, and where they are.