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 see those poor little fingers groping over the paper feeling for the poem that she couldn’t see.  And she said so pitifully, ’My long, long night!  There are no stars in this night!’ And to think it’s all my fault!  Oh, it is just killing me!  I could hardly sleep last night for thinking of it, and when I did I had a dreadful nightmare.