so unnecessary, so disconnected, sometimes work out into
an orderly sequence, out of which evil comes to some and good to
others? If we could only forestall Chance! Blind, blundering, witless
Chance!"

Hollister nodded, forgetting that the girl could not see. For a minute
they sat silent. He was thinking how strange it was that he should
meet this girl whose books he had been poring over all these weeks.
She had a mind, he perceived. She could think and express her thoughts
in sentences as clean-cut as her face. She made him think, thrust him
face to face with an abstraction. Blind, blundering, witless Chance!
Was there nothing more than that? What else was there?

"You make me feel ashamed of myself," he said at last. "Your luck has
been worse than mine. Your handicap is greater than mine--at least you
must feel it so. But you don't complain. You even seem quite
philosophic about it. I wish I could cultivate that spirit. What's
your secret?"

"Oh, I'm not such a marvel," she said, and the slight smile came back
to lurk around the corners of her mouth. "There are times when I
rebel--oh, desperately. But I get along very nicely as a general
thing. One accepts the inevitable. I comfort myself with the selfish
reflection that if I can't see a lot that I would dearly love to see,
I am also saved the sight of things that are mean and sordid and
disturbing. If I seem cheerful I daresay it's because I'm strong and
healthy and have grown used to being blind. I'm not nearly so helpless
as I may seem. In familiar places and within certain bounds, I can get
about nearly as well as if I could see."

The steamer cleared the Redondas, stood down through Desolation Sound
and turned her blunt nose into the lower gulf just as dark came on.
Hollister and Doris Cleveland sat in the cabin talking. They went to
dinner together, and if there were curious looks bestowed upon them
Hollister was too engrossed to care and the girl, of course, could not
see those sidelong, unspoken inquiries. After dinner they found chairs
in the same deck saloon and continued their conversation until ten
o'clock, when drowsiness born of a slow, rolling motion of the vessel
drove them to their berths.

The drowsiness abandoned Hollister as soon as he turned in. He lay
wakeful, thinking about Doris Cleveland. He envied her courage and
fortitude, the calm assurance with which she seemed to face the world
which was all about her and yet hidden from her sight.