But presently they heard the “White Seal’s Lullaby” sung softly within.  She had taken Betty in her arms, and was rocking her as tenderly as she had rocked the Little Colonel, while she sang, “Oh, hush thee, my baby, the night is behind us.”

When Betty fell asleep it was in the embrace of something far more comforting and restful than the “arms of the slow-swinging seas.”  For the first time in her life since she could remember, she felt what it was to be folded fast in the mother-love that she had always longed for.

CHAPTER XIV.

A LONG NIGHT.

“Oh, isn’t it awful!” exclaimed the Little Colonel, in a shocked tone, and with such a look of horror in her face that Eugenia leaned forward to listen.  Lloyd was speaking to Joyce on the porch just outside of the library window, where Eugenia sat reading.

“What is awful?” asked Eugenia, her curiosity aroused by the expression of the girls’ faces.

“Sh!” whispered Lloyd, warningly, as she tiptoed to the window and sat down on the broad, low sill.  “I am afraid Betty will hear us talking about her.  The doctor has just been here, and he says—­oh, Eugenia, it is too terrible to tell—­he says he is afraid that Betty is going blind!”

The tears stood in the Little Colonel’s eyes.  “You know that people do lose their sight sometimes when they have the measles, and her eyes have been the worst part of it from the start.  The night before the measles broke out on her she read till nearly morning by candle-light, because she was restless and couldn’t go to sleep.  Of course that made them worse.”

“Blind!” echoed Eugenia, closing her own eyes a moment on the bright summer world without, and feeling a chill run over her, as she realised what black dungeon walls those five letters could build around a life.

“Was the doctor sure, Lloyd?  Can’t something be done?”

“Of co’se he wasn’t suah.  I heard him tell mothah that he wouldn’t give up fighting for her sight as long as there was a shadow of a chance to save it, but he advised her to send for an oculist to consult with him, and she’s just now telephoned to the city for one.”

“Does Betty know it?”

“She knows that there is dangah of her losing her sight, and is tryin’ so hahd to be quiet and patient.”

Eugenia laid down her book, feeling faint and sick.  For a long time after Lloyd and Joyce had left her she sat idly playing with the curtain cord, thinking over what they had told her.  Presently she tiptoed up-stairs to her room.  She stood a moment outside Betty’s door, listening, for Betty was talking to Eliot, and she wanted to hear what a person with such a prospect staring her in the face would have to say.

“There are lots of beautiful things in the world to think about, Eliot,” Betty was saying bravely, in her sweet, cheery little voice.