the question.

"I put you out--don't I?" said Grosse. "You can't shut your eyes, my
lofely Feench, while I am looking--can you?"

She turned red--then pale again. I began to be afraid she would burst out
crying. Grosse managed her to perfection. The tact of this rough, ugly,
eccentric old man was the most perfect tact I have ever met with.

"Shut your eyes," he said soothingly. "It is the right ways to learn.
Shut your eyes, and take them in your hands, and tell me which is round
and which is square in that way first."

She told him directly.

"Goot! now open your eyes, and see for yourself it is the saucers you
have got in your right hand, and the books you have got in your left. You
see? Goot again! Put them back on the table now. What shall we do next?"

"May I try if I can write?" she asked eagerly. "I do so want to see if I
can write with my eyes instead of my finger."

"No! Ten thausand times no! I forbid reading; I forbid writing, yet. Come
with me to the window. How do these most troublesome eyes of yours do at
a distance?"

While we had been trying our experiment with Lucilla, the weather had
brightened again. The clouds were parting; the sun was coming out; the
bright gaps of blue in the sky were widening every moment; the shadows
were traveling grandly over the windy slopes of the hills. Lucilla lifted
her hands in speechless admiration as the German threw open the window,
and placed her face to face with the view.

"Oh!" she exclaimed, "don't speak to me! don't touch me!--let me enjoy
it! There is no disappointment _here._ I have never thought, I have never
dreamed, of anything half so beautiful as _this!_"

Grosse looked at me, and silently pointed to her. She had turned
pale--she was trembling in every limb, overwhelmed by her own ecstatic
sense of the glory of the sky and the beauty of the earth, as they now
met her view for the first time. I penetrated the surgeon's object in
directing my attention to her. "See" (he meant to say), "what a
delicately-organized creature we have to deal with! Is it possible to be
too careful in handling such a sensitive temperament as that?"
Understanding him only too well, I also trembled when I thought of the
future. Everything now depended on Nugent. And Nugent's own lips had told
me that he could not depend on himself!

It was a relief to me when Grosse interrupted her.

She pleaded hard to be allowed to stay at the window a little longer. He
refused to al