This morning he felt within himself a sudden accession of strength; his long sleep-acting with his extraordinary recuperative powers, had set fresh tides of vitality on the flow. Something had happened lately which in spite of all, interested him--ah, yes, the gradual compensating sensitiveness in his hands. He had played a whole _partie_ of picquet with Madge, using those cards with raised indexes. The _partie_ had only taken an hour--not bad for a beginning; to-day perhaps he would be a little quicker. To-day also these bandages that worried him with their close-clinging, sticky feeling would be removed, and with regard to them he could not help half-thinking that when they were gone, some light, however dim, must reach him. Surely the blackness would become a sort of grey. It was unreasonable, he knew well, but he could not help feeling that it must be so. But the fact that he thought about the picquet he had played and the greater celerity with which he was going to play it, even the idea, which he himself knew to be purely imaginary, that he would not feel so terribly alone and in the dark when these bandages were removed, all pointed one way: he looked, or tried to look, forward instead of brooding backwards. And in such matters, as indeed in all others, the will is the deed, provided only that the will be undivided. So for the time the utter blackness of his waking moments was gone, the tiny things of life, as well as life's ultimate possibilities, still retained their interest, and while he waited for his breakfast, he kept feeling with his nimble, hovering hands at all objects within reach: the woolliness of the blankets, the cool texture of the sheets, a certain slipperiness of counterpane, which eventually he determined to be silk-covered. Then there was wall-paper above his head; there was a pattern on that, and with both hands he traced his way up the slight raising of the design, stopping often, visualising to himself what the picture of the course of his fingers would be like.... There was a spray of some sort; it branched to the left and ended in narrow, slender leaves. On the right it went higher before it branched; there were leaves there, too, and above again there started a stem like the one he had traced a minute before. Yes; it repeated here, for first to the left went out a thinner stem with narrow leaves; then again to the right it branched, and narrow leaves forked out from it. He had seen it, of course, before, on the evening he arrived here, but he could not remember it from that.... Thin stem and narrow leaves--ah, a Morris paper of willow twigs! But the feeling fingers had given it him; without this exploration he could not have known it. This was an enormous advance, and, without pause, for he instinctively knew the step that came through the dressing-room adjoining, he called out: