“_An awful thing has happened. John is blinded. Mrs. Haye, his stepmother, you know, wrote a letter from Barwood which reached me this morning. The doctors say he hasn’t a chance of seeing again. She has asked me to write to all his school friends and to you. It is a terrible story. Apparently he was going home after Noat had ‘gone down,’ on Thursday, that is. The train was somewhere between Stroud and Gloucester, and was just going to enter a cutting. A small boy was sitting on the fence by the line and threw a big stone at the train. John must have been looking through the window at the time, for the broken glass caught him full, cut great furrows in his face, and both his eyes are blind for good. Isn’t it dreadful? Mrs. Haye says that he suffers terribly. It is a tragedy. Blindness, the most ...” etc._ PART II CHRYSALIS PART II--CHRYSALIS CHAPTER I NEWS OUTSIDE it was raining, and through the leaded window panes a grey light came and was lost in the room. The afternoon was passing wearily, and the soft sound of the rain, never faster, never slower, tired. A big bed in one corner of the room, opposite a chest of drawers, and on it a few books and a pot of false flowers. In the grate a weary fire, hissing spitefully when a drop of rain found its way down the chimney. Below the bed a yellow wardrobe over which large grain marks circled aimlessly, on which there was a full-length glass. Beyond, the door, green as were the thick embrasures of the two windows green, and the carpet, and the curtains. The walls were a neutral yellow that said nothing, and on them were hung cheap Italian crayon drawings of precocious saints in infancy. The room was called the Saints’ Room. Behind the glass of each were hundreds of dead flies, midges, for the room had a strange attraction for these things in summer, when the white ceiling would be black with them by sunset. With winter coming on they would creep away under the glass to pine on attendant angel lips. Perhaps the attraction was rather the hot-water cistern that was under the roof just above, and which gave a hint of passion to the virgin whitewash. He lay in bed, imagining the room. To the left, on the dressing-table by the bed, would be the looking-glass that would never stay the right level. It would be propped up with a book, so that it gazed blandly up at the ceiling, mimicking the chalky white, and waiting for something else to mimic. On the chair between table and bed was sitting the young trained nurse, breathing stertorously over a book.