It wasn't very long before Verna was head-over-heels (fearful picture!) infatuated with him. Somehow his friendliness had touched a hidden spring in this ugly, friendless, clumsy girl and for once she had lost her fear of the world's ridicule and opened her hulking heart to another human being. It was touching but rather overpowering, especially since she always opened her mouth too. He learned a great deal about herself, her invalid father, Elizabethan and Restoration poetry, paleontology, an organization known as the Working Girls' Front, Mr. Abrusian, and a brassy Miss Minkin who sounded like a fiendish caricature of Vivian. He felt that deliberately avoiding Verna would be a dirtier trick than he liked to think himself capable of. Nevertheless there were times when he seriously wished he'd never acquired whatever power it was--except for Vivian, of course. What the devil, he asked himself for the _n_th time, could that power be? That night, in the bathroom, the question came back to him and he impulsively switched off the light and looked into the mirror. He gasped and seemed on the point of shrieking out something, but he only grasped the washbowl more tightly and stared into the mirror more intently. After about a minute, he tugged on the light again. He was pale. He had convinced himself of the actual existence of the phenomenon that was in reality the third of the Little Gifts: Flashing Eyes. He couldn't notice anything in the light, but in the dark his eyes gave off a faint blue flash about every five seconds, just as Vivian had said, lighting up his cheeks and eyebrows like some comic-book vampire! It might be attractive by day, when it just registered as an impalpable hint, but it was damn sinister in the dark! It wasn't much, but it was _there_--unless the flashes were inside his head and he was projecting them ... blue ... something called the Purkinje effect? ... but then Vivian had actually seen ... oh, damn! * * * * * Suddenly he wildly looked around, a little like a trapped animal. Why did it always have to happen in the _bathroom_, he asked himself--the bicarb, the flame, the blade (if that counted), and now this? Could there be something wrong about the bathroom, something either in the room itself or in his childhood associations? But neither the bathroom walls nor his minutely searched memory returned an answer. It was dark in the hall outside and he almost bumped into his sister. He recoiled, stared at her a moment, then threw his hand over his eyes, darted into his bedroom and shut the door. "Is there something wrong, Ernie?" she called after him. "Wrong?" The door muffled his voice. "How do you mean?" "I mean about your eyes." "My _eyes_?" It was almost a scream. "What about my eyes?" "Don't shout, Ernie. I mean are they painful?" "Painful? Why should they be painful?" "I really don't know, Ernie." She was being very patient and calm.