She spoke a little absently, with the faintest shadow of regret, her voice lingering on the words.  And after a momentary silence she went on: 

“We lived there nearly a year, my two brothers and I. I know every rock and gully within two miles of that cabin.  I helped to build that little house.  I used to tramp around in the woods alone.  I used to sit and read, and sometimes just dream, under those big cedars on hot summer afternoons.  The boys thought they would make a little fortune in that timber.  Then one day, when they were felling a tree, a flying limb struck me on the head—­and I was blind; in less than two hours of being unconscious I woke up, and I couldn’t see anything—­like that almost,” she snapped her finger.  “On top of that my brothers discovered that they had no right to cut timber there.  Things were going badly in France, too.  So they went overseas.  They were both killed in the same action, on the same day.  My books were left there because no one had the heart to carry them out.  It was all such a muddle.  Everything seemed to go wrong at once.  And you found them and enjoyed having them to read.  Isn’t it curious how things that seem so incoherent, so unnecessary, so disconnected, sometimes work out into an orderly sequence, out of which evil comes to some and good to others?  If we could only forestall Chance!  Blind, blundering, witless Chance!”

Hollister nodded, forgetting that the girl could not see.  For a minute they sat silent.  He was thinking how strange it was that he should meet this girl whose books he had been poring over all these weeks.  She had a mind, he perceived.  She could think and express her thoughts in sentences as clean-cut as her face.  She made him think, thrust him face to face with an abstraction.  Blind, blundering, witless Chance!  Was there nothing more than that?  What else was there?

“You make me feel ashamed of myself,” he said at last.  “Your luck has been worse than mine.  Your handicap is greater than mine—­at least you must feel it so.  But you don’t complain.  You even seem quite philosophic about it.  I wish I could cultivate that spirit.  What’s your secret?”

“Oh, I’m not such a marvel,” she said, and the slight smile came back to lurk around the corners of her mouth.  “There are times when I rebel—­oh, desperately.  But I get along very nicely as a general thing.  One accepts the inevitable.  I comfort myself with the selfish reflection that if I can’t see a lot that I would dearly love to see, I am also saved the sight of things that are mean and sordid and disturbing.  If I seem cheerful I daresay it’s because I’m strong and healthy and have grown used to being blind.  I’m not nearly so helpless as I may seem.  In familiar places and within certain bounds, I can get about nearly as well as if I could see.”