Oh, Bob,
Bob! Sometimes I can't stand this blackness. Never to see you--never
to see the sun or the stars--never to see the hills, the trees, the
grass. Always to grope. Always night--night--night without beginning
or end."

And Hollister still had no words to comfort her. He could only hold
her close, kiss her glossy brown hair, feeling all the while a
passionate sympathy--and yet conscious of a guilty gladness that she
could not see him--that she could not look at him and be revolted and
draw away. He knew that she clung to him now as the one clear light in
the darkness. He was not sure that she (or any other woman) would do
that if she could see him as he really was.

Her sobs died in her throat. She leaned against him passively for a
minute. Then she lifted her face and smiled.

"It's silly to let go like that," she said. "Once in awhile it comes
over me like a panic. I wonder if you will always be patient with me
when I get like that. Sometimes I fairly rave. But I won't do it
often. I don't know why I should feel that way now. I have never been
so happy. Yet that feeling came over me like a suffocating wave. I am
afraid your wife is rather a temperamental creature, Bob."

She ended with a laugh and a pout, to which Hollister made appropriate
response. Then he led her into the house and smiled--or would have
smiled had his face been capable of that expression--at the pleasure
with which her hands, which she had trained to be her organs of
vision, sought and found doors and cupboards, chairs, the varied
equipment of the kitchen. He watched her find her way about with the
uncanny certainty of the sightless, at which he never ceased to
marvel. When she came back at last to where he sat on a table,
swinging one foot while he smoked a cigarette, she put her arms around
him and said:

"It's a cute little house, Bob. The air here is like old wine. The
smell of the woods is like heaven, after soot and smoke and coal gas.
I'm the happiest woman in the whole country."

Hollister looked at her. He knew by the glow on her face that she
spoke as she felt, that she was happy, that he had made her so. And he
was proud of himself for a minute, as a man becomes when he is
conscious of having achieved greatness, however briefly.

Only he was aware of a shadow. Doris leaned against him talking of
things they would do, of days to come. He looked over her shoulder
through the west window and his eye rested on Bland's cabin, w