Karl shrugged one shoulder in a nervous little way he had acquired. "Oh--so, so. Pretty fair, I guess." His face settled into a gloom then, but almost immediately he roused himself from it to say, in a voice more cheerful than spontaneous: "They'll be finished in a couple of weeks. I'm both glad and sorry. Don't know just what I'll go at then." Again he seemed to settle into the gloom which the doctor could see was ever there waiting to receive him. But again he roused himself almost immediately. Was it this way with the man all the time? A continuous fight against surrendering? "But I'm mighty thankful I've had the books," he said. "They've pulled me through the winter, and they've enabled me to make a living. Lord, but a man would hate not to make a living!" he concluded, straightening up a trifle, more like the Karl of old. The sheer pathos of it had never come home to the doctor as it did with that. A man who should have stood upon the very mountain peaks of fame now proudly claiming that he was able to make a living! But if it brought home the pathos of the situation it also brought new sense of the manhood of Karl Hubers. It was great--Parkman told himself--great! A man who felt within himself all the forces which make for greatness could force himself into the place of the average man, and thank the Lord that he was able to make a living! "Here's a little scheme I've worked out," Karl said, and opening one of the drawers of the library table, pulled out the model for the idea he had worked out for reading and writing in Braille. It was the first Dr. Parkman had heard of it; he wanted to know all about it, and Karl explained how it had seemed to him as soon as he learned how the blind read and wrote that the thing could be simplified and vastly improved. So he had worked this out; he explained its points of difference, and wanted to know what Parkman thought of it. "Why, man," exclaimed the doctor, "it strikes me you've revolutionized the whole business. But--why, Karl--nobody ever thought of this before?" "The usual speech," laughed Karl. "But in this case it seems so confoundedly true." "Well I believe it will help some, and I'll be glad of that," he added simply. "Oh I have some more schemes. If I've got to be blind I'm going to make blindness a better business." "Our old friend the devil didn't do so well then after all," said Dr. Parkman quietly. "He closed up one channel, but he didn't figure on your burrowing another." Karl laughed. "Oh this won't worry him much; it came so easily I can't think it amounts to a great deal. But as long as I was used to scheming things out it--amused me, exercised a few cells that were in pretty bad need of a job. And I have other ideas," he repeated.