The other man laid a hand on his shoulder, saying:  “I don’t know whether you’re doing right or not.  I half suspect you are doing Marmion a bitter wrong.”

“Oh, but she can’t—­she can’t love me!” Austin rose as if frightened.  “She might yield to her impulse and—­well, marry me, for she has a heart of gold, but it wouldn’t last.  She would learn some time that it wasn’t real love that prompted the sacrifice.  Then I should die.”

The specialist from Berlin came, but he refused to operate, declaring bluntly that there was no use, and all during the long, hot summer days Robert Austin sat beside his open window watching the light die out of the world, waiting, waiting, for the time to make his sacrifice.

Suydam read Marmion’s cheery letters aloud, wondering the while at the wistful note they sounded now and then.  He answered them in his own handwriting, which she had never seen.

One day came the announcement that she was returning the first week in October.  Already September was partly gone, so Austin decided to sail in a week.  At his dictation Suydam wrote to her, saying that the strain of overwork had rendered a long vacation necessary.  The doctor writhed internally as he penned the careful sentences, wondering if the hurt of the deliberately chosen words would prevent her sensing the truth back of them.  As days passed and no answer came he judged it had.

The apartment was stripped and bare, the trunks were packed on the afternoon before Austin’s departure.  All through the dreary mockery of the process the blind man had withstood his friend’s appeal, his stern face set, his heavy heart full of a despairing stubbornness.  Now, being alone at last, he groped his way about the premises to fix them in his memory; then he sank into his chair beside the window.

He heard a knock at the door and summoned the stranger to enter, then he rose with a gasp of dismay.  Marmion Moore was greeting him with sweet, yet hesitating effusiveness.

“I—­I thought you were not coming back until next week,” he stammered.

“We changed our plans.”  She searched his face as best she could in the shaded light, a strange, anxious expression upon her own.  “Your letter surprised me.”

“The doctor’s orders,” he said, carelessly.  “They say I have broken down.”

“I know!  I know what caused it!” she panted.  “You never recovered from that accident.  You did not tell me the truth.  I’ve always felt that you were hiding something from me.  Why?  Oh, why?”

“Nonsense!” He undertook to laugh, but failed in a ghastly manner.  “I’ve been working too hard.  Now I’m paying the penalty.”

“How long will you be gone?” she queried.

“Oh, I haven’t decided.  A long time, however.”  His tone bewildered her.  “It is the first vacation I ever had; I want to make the most of it.”

“You—­you were going away without saying good-by to—­your old friends?” Her lips were white, and her brave attempt to smile would have told him the truth had he seen it, but he only had her tone to go by, so he answered, indifferently: