“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. 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.