When the son beheld the dear form veiled in such a long night, for whom there was no longer child or sunlight, he slid his hand, whose pulse trembled with pity, joy, and hope, under Eymann's, and hurriedly extended it, and pressed the father's under a strange name. But he had to go out of the house door again, till the trembling of his hand under the weight of the salvation it was bringing should subside, and he restrained out there his heart beating with hope by the thought that the operation might be unsuccessful; he looked with a smile up and down along the twelve-horse-team of the corps of cadets, that the emotion and yearning might pass from his excited breast. In-doors, meanwhile, the Chaplain's wife had made the blind man a still blinder one, and lied to him _quantum satis_; whenever a lie, a pious fraud, a _dolum bonum_, a poetic and legal fiction is to be gotten up, women offer themselves readily as business secretaries and court-printers, and help out their honest man. "I very much wish," said the father, as the son entered, "that the operation might at once proceed before my son arrives." The Chaplain's wife brought back the anxious son and disclosed to him the paternal wish. He stepped lightly forward amidst the embarrassed company. The room was shaded, the couching-lancet brought forth, and the diseased eye steadied. All stood with anxious attention around the composed patient. The Chaplain peered with a ludicrous anxiety and agony at the sleeping infant, prepared, at the least cry, to run with it immediately out of the couching-chamber. Agatha and Flamin kept themselves far from the patient, and both were equally serious. Flamin's noble mother drew near with her heart seized at once by joy and anxiety and love, and with her overflowing eyes, which obeyed her agitated heart. Victor wept for fear and for joy beside his dumb father, but he passionately smothered every drop that might disturb him. Thus does every operation, by the climax of preparation, communicate to the spectator heart-beating and trembling. Only the veiled Briton,--a man who lifted his head coldly and serenely, like a high mountain over a torrid zone,--he offered to the filial hand a face silent and motionless; he kept composed and mute before the fate which was now to decide whether his dreary night should reach even to the grave or no farther than this minute....