A dozen times she made an effort to break through the barricade of falsehood; and a dozen times I drove her back, all but crying to her, “No, No!  Don’t ask me!” Until at last, late one night, she caught my hand and clung to it in a grip I could not break.  “Mary!  Mary!  You must tell me the truth!”

“Dear girl—­” I began.

“Listen!” she cried.  “I know you are deceiving me!  I know why—­because I’ll make myself ill.  But it won’t do any longer; it’s preying on me, Mary—­I’ve taken to imagining things.  So you must tell me the truth!”

I sat, avoiding her eyes, beaten; and in the pause I could feel her hands shaking.  “Mary, what is it?  Is my baby going to die?”

“No, dear, indeed no!” I cried.

“Then what?”

“Sylvia,” I began, as quietly as I could, “the truth is not as bad as you imagine—­”

“Tell me what it is!”

“But it is bad, Sylvia.  And you must be brave.  You must be, for your baby’s sake.”

“Make haste!” she cried.

“The baby,” I said, “may be blind.”

“Blind!” There we sat, gazing into each other’s eyes, like two statues of women.  But the grasp of her hand tightened, until even my big fist was hurt.  “Blind!” she whispered again.

“Sylvia,” I rushed on, “it isn’t so bad as it might be!  Think—­if you had lost her altogether!”

“Blind!”

“You will have her always; and you can do things for her—­take care of her.  They do wonders for the blind nowadays—­and you have the means; to do everything.  Really, you know, blind children are not unhappy—­some of them are happier than other children, I think.  They haven’t so much to miss.  Think—­”

“Wait, wait,” she whispered; and again there was silence, and I clung to her cold hands.

“Sylvia,” I said, at last, “you have a newly-born infant to nurse, and its very life depends upon your health now.  You cannot let yourself grieve.”

“No,” she responded.  “No.  But, Mary, what caused this?”

So there was the end of my spell of truth-telling.  “I don’t know, dear.  Nobody knows.  There might be a thousand things—­”

“Was it born blind?”

“No.”

“Then was it the doctor’s fault?”

“No, it was nobody’s fault.  Think of the thousands and tens of thousands of babies that become blind!  It’s a dreadful accident that happens.”  So I went on—­possessed with a dread that had been with me for days, that had kept me awake for hours in the night:  Had I, in any of my talks with Sylvia about venereal disease, mentioned blindness in infants as one of the consequences?  I could not rememher; but now was the time I would find out!

She lay there, immovable, like a woman who had died in grief; until at last I flung my arms about her and whispered, “Sylvia!  Sylvia!  Please cry!”

“I can’t cry!” she whispered, and her voice sounded hard.