“In other words, I show by my face that I am a Bernard, and something of a spitfire,” suggested Edith, and Richard rejoined,

“I think you do,” adding as he held her a little closer to him, “Had I been earlier blessed with sight, I should have known I could not tame you.  I should only have spoiled you by indulgence.”

Just at this point, little Nina came in, and taking her in her arms, Edith said,

“I wanted to call her Edith, after myself, as I thought it might please you; but Arthur said no, she must be Nina Bernard,”

“Better so,” returned Richard, moving away from the picture, “I can never call another by the name I once called you,” and this was all the sign he gave that the wound was not quite healed.

But it was healing fast.  Home influences were already doing him good, and when at last supper was announced, he looked very happy as he took again his accustomed seat at the table, with Arthur opposite Edith just where she used to be, and Grace, sitting at his right.  It was a pleasant family party they made, and the servants marvelled much to hear Richard’s hearty laugh mingling with Edith’s merry peal.

That night, when the July moon came up over the New England hills, it looked down upon the four—­Richard and Arthur, Grace and Edith, sitting upon the broad piazza as they had not sat in years, Grace a little apart from the rest, and Edith between her husband and Richard, holding a hand of each, and listening intently while the latter told them how rumors of a celebrated Parisian oculist had reached him in his wanderings; how he had sought the rooms of that oculist, leaving them a more hopeful man than when he entered; how the hope then enkindled grew stronger month after month, until the thick folds of darkness gave way to a creamy kind of haze, which hovered for weeks over his horizon of sights growing gradually whiter and thinner, until faint outlines were discovered, and to his unutterable joy he counted the window panes, knowing then that sight was surely coming back.  He did not tell them how through all that terrible suspense Nina seemed always with him; he would not like to confess how superstitious he had become, fully believing that Nina was his guardian angel, that she hovered near him, and that the touch of her soft, little hands had helped to heal the wound gaping so cruelly when he last bade adieu to his native land.  Richard was not a spiritualist.  He utterly repudiated their wild theories, and built up one of his own, equally wild and strange, but productive of no evil, inasmuch as no one was admitted into his secret, or suffered to know of his one acknowledged sphere where Nina reigned supreme.  This was something he kept to himself, referring but once to Nina during his narrative, and that when he said to Edith,

“You remember, darling, Nina told me in her letter that she’d keep asking God to give me back my sight.”

Edith cared but little by whose agency this great cure had been accomplished, and laying her head on Richard’s knee, just as a girl she used to do, she wept out her joy for sight restored to her noble benefactor, reproaching him for having kept the good news from them so carefully, even shutting his eyes when he wrote to them so that his writing should be natural, and the surprise when he did return, the greater.