So, after a space, I said, “Then, dear, I think I will have to make you laugh.”

“Laugh, Mary?”

“Yes-I will tell you about the quarrel between Aunt Varina and myself.  You know what times we’ve been having-how I shocked the poor lady?”

She was looking at me, but her eyes were not seeing me.  “Yes, Mary,” she said, in the same dead tone.

“Well, that was a game we made for you.  It was very funny!”

“Funny?”

“Yes!  Because I really did shock her-though we started out just to give you something else to think about!”

And then suddenly I saw the healing tears begin to come.  She could not weep for her own grief-but she could weep because of what she knew we two had had to suffer for her!

21.  I went out and told the others what I had done; and Mrs. Tuis rushed in to her niece and they wept in each other’s arms, and Mrs. Tuis explained all the mysteries of life by her formula, “the will of the Lord.”

Later on came Dr. Perrin, and it was touching to see how Sylvia treated him.  She had, it appeared, conceived the idea that the calamity must be due to some blunder on his part, and then she had reflected that he was young, and that chance had thrown upon him a responsibility for which he had not bargained.  He must be reproaching himself bitterly, so she had to persuade him that it was really not so bad as we were making it-that a blind child was a great joy to a mother’s soul-in some ways even a greater joy than a perfectly sound child, because it appealed so to her protective instinct!  I had called Sylvia a shameless payer of compliments, and now I went away by myself and wept.

Yet it was true in a way.  When the infant was brought in to be nursed again, how she clung to it, a very picture of the sheltering and protecting instinct of motherhood!  She knew the worst now—­her mind was free, and she could partake of what happiness was allowed her.  The child was hers to love and care for, and she would find ways to atone to it for the harshness of fate.

So little by little we got our existence upon a working basis.  We lived a peaceful, routine life, to the music of cocoanut-palms rustling in the warm breezes which blew incessantly off the Mexican Gulf.  Aunt Varina had, for the time, her undisputed way with the family; her niece reclined upon the veranda in true Southern lady fashion, and was read aloud to from books of indisputable respectability.  I remember Aunt Varina selected the “Idylls of the King,” and they two were in a mood to shed tears over these solemn, sorrowful tales.  So it came that the little one got her name, after a pale and unhappy heroine.