eyes, would you tell me to do that?"

"My eyes? What do you mean? To see again?"

"If I gave you back your sight, I would be giving you back the truth;
and that would be very, very cruel."

He saw the fluttering of her throat, the twitching of the hands in her
lap, and so hurried on.

"Listen! There's a chance in a hundred that your sight can be
restored. My old preceptor writes me, from what I've told him, that
there is about that chance. If it did succeed----"

"Then I'd see again!"

"Yes. So you would be very unhappy."

"You say a thing like that!"

He winced, flushed.

"You come here now with hopes that you ought not to offer, and you
qualify even that! Fine--fine! You think I can stand much more than I
have?"

Still the trembling of her hands, the fluttering at her throat. He
endured it for a time, but broke out savagely at last. "You'd be
perfect then--as lovely as ever any woman--why, you're perfect now!
And yet without that one flaw where would you be? You'd not be married
then, though you are now."

"Go on!" she said at length, coldly.

"You don't know one of us here except that girl, Annie, as different
from you as night is from day. You don't know about the rest of us.
You only think about us, imagine us--you don't see us, don't know us.
Ah, God! If you only could! But--if you did!"

The last words broke from him unconsciously. He sat chilled with
horror at his own speech, but knew he had to go on.

"I am going to do what shall leave us both unhappy as long as we live.
I'll give you back your eyes if I can."

"I am helpless." She spoke simply.

"Yes! Why, if I even look at you, I feel I'm an eavesdropper, I'm
stealing. You can't see in my face what your face puts there--you
can't see my eyes with yours. You can't understand how you've made me
know things I never did know until I saw you. Why, cruel? yes! And
now you're asking me to be still more cruel. And I'm going to be."

"Don't!" she broke out. "Oh, God! Don't! Please--you must not talk.
I thought you were different from this."

"And yet you have asked me a dozen times what's wrong here. Why,
everything's wrong! That man loves you because he can see you--any man
would--but you don't love him, because you _haven't_ seen him. You're
not a woman to him at all, but an abstraction. He's not a man to you
at all, but an imagination. _That's_ not love of man and woman. But
when you have back your eyes,--_then