He could see beauty where Doris saw it.  It surrounded him, leaped to his eye whenever his eye turned,—­a beauty of woods and waters, of rugged hills and sapphire skies.  And he was suddenly filled with a great gladness that he could respond to this.  He was quickened to a strange emotion by the thought that life could still hold for him so much that seemed good.  He put one arm caressingly, protectingly, across his wife’s shoulder, over the smooth, firm flesh that gleamed through thin silk.

She turned swiftly, buried her face against his breast and burst into tears, into a strange fit of sobbing.  She clung to him like a frightened child.  Her body quivered as if some unseen force grasped and shook her with uncontrollable power.  Hollister held her fast, dismayed, startled, wondering, at a loss to comfort her.

“But I can’t see it,” she cried.  “I’ll never see it again.  Oh, Bob, Bob!  Sometimes I can’t stand this blackness.  Never to see you—­never to see the sun or the stars—­never to see the hills, the trees, the grass.  Always to grope.  Always night—­night—­night without beginning or end.”

And Hollister still had no words to comfort her.  He could only hold her close, kiss her glossy brown hair, feeling all the while a passionate sympathy—­and yet conscious of a guilty gladness that she could not see him—­that she could not look at him and be revolted and draw away.  He knew that she clung to him now as the one clear light in the darkness.  He was not sure that she (or any other woman) would do that if she could see him as he really was.

Her sobs died in her throat.  She leaned against him passively for a minute.  Then she lifted her face and smiled.

“It’s silly to let go like that,” she said.  “Once in awhile it comes over me like a panic.  I wonder if you will always be patient with me when I get like that.  Sometimes I fairly rave.  But I won’t do it often.  I don’t know why I should feel that way now.  I have never been so happy.  Yet that feeling came over me like a suffocating wave.  I am afraid your wife is rather a temperamental creature, Bob.”

She ended with a laugh and a pout, to which Hollister made appropriate response.  Then he led her into the house and smiled—­or would have smiled had his face been capable of that expression—­at the pleasure with which her hands, which she had trained to be her organs of vision, sought and found doors and cupboards, chairs, the varied equipment of the kitchen.  He watched her find her way about with the uncanny certainty of the sightless, at which he never ceased to marvel.  When she came back at last to where he sat on a table, swinging one foot while he smoked a cigarette, she put her arms around him and said: 

“It’s a cute little house, Bob.  The air here is like old wine.  The smell of the woods is like heaven, after soot and smoke and coal gas.  I’m the happiest woman in the whole country.”