it in this papah with yo' name
at the bottom,--Elizabeth Lloyd Lewis! Now aren't you stuck up? We are
all so proud of you we don't know what to do."

Betty stretched out one trembling hand for the paper, and involuntarily
the other went up to her eyes to push away the bandages. "Let me see
it," she cried, eagerly, but the thrill of gladness in her voice died in
a pitiful little note of despair as she whispered, brokenly, "Oh, I
forgot! I can't see!"

But the next instant her hand was groping for the paper again. "Where
is it?" she asked. "Let me feel it, anyway. Oh, to think that something
I have written has really been published! Where is it, Lloyd? Put my
hand on the spot, please. You don't know how glad I am, how glad and
thankful. I have always wanted to write--always hoped that some day,
after I had tried years and years, I might be able to do something good
enough to be published, but to have it come now while I am a little
girl,"--her voice sunk almost to a whisper,--"oh, Lloyd you don't know
how wonderful it seems to me!"

She was trembling so that the paper shook in her hands. "Where is it?"
she asked again, feeling blindly over the page.

"There," said Lloyd, placing the little groping finger on a spot at the
head of a column. "There is the word _NIGHT_, and heah," guiding her
fingers down the page, "heah is yo' name. If I were you I'd be so stuck
up I wouldn't speak to common people that can't have verses published in
the papah."

"But--oh--if you couldn't--_see_--it!" Betty's words came in choking
little gasps. She paused a moment and turned her face away, swallowing
hard. Then she went on more calmly.

"Wasn't it queer that I should have written about Night, just before
mine begun? That the only thing I shall ever have published should be
called that? My long, long night! But there are no stars in this night.
Lloyd, it's awful to think you'll always be in the dark!"

Lloyd turned with a startled glance to the other girls.

"I--I don't know what you mean," she stammered.

"Yes, you do," insisted Betty. "What you've been trying to keep from me,
all of you, that I am always going to be--_blind_!"

She ended the sentence with a little shiver, and, choking with sobs,
turned her face to the wall. At a sign from the nurse, Lloyd slipped
away and ran to her mother's room. She found Eugenia already there, with
her head buried in Mrs. Sherman's lap.

"Oh, it almost broke my heart!" she was saying. "To se