With firm, quick hand he wrenched open the doors. He put his hand upon what he knew to be the tube. He pulled it out, turned around to the light and held it up between him and the window. For one moment he looked away;--how parched his mouth was! And then, a mighty will turning his eyes upon it, in one long gaze he read the plain, unmistakable, unalterable truth. He had never seen a better culture. Science would perhaps commit itself no further than to say his eyes had become inoculated with the most virulent germ known to pathology. But out beyond the efforts which would be made to save him, he read--written large--the truth. He was going blind. CHAPTER XVI "GOOD LUCK, BEASON!" Minutes passed and nothing happened. There was no sound of splintering glass. The tube did not fall from his hands. Not so much as gasp or groan broke the stillness of the laboratory. He did not seem to have moved even the muscle of a finger. He faced it. He understood it. He faced it and understood it as he had no other truth in all his life. No merciful, mitigating force caused his mind to totter. With fairly cosmic regularity, cosmic inevitability, comprehension struck blow after blow. He was going blind. He had spent his life studying the action of such forces as this. _He knew them!_ A man who knew less would have hoped more. Some idle dreamer might attempt to push one star closer to another. An astronomer would not do that. He was going blind. He could no more do his work without his eyes than the daylight could come without the sun. Fate jeered at him: "Your eyes are gone, but your life will remain." It was like saying to the sun: "You are not to give any more light, but you are to go on shining just the same." He was going blind. The world which had just opened to him--the world of sunsets and forests and mountains and seas gulped to black nothingness! Blind! Swept under by a trick he would not have believed possible from his most careless student! Mastered by the things he had believed he controlled! Meeting his life's destruction from the things which were to bring his life's triumph! In that moment of understanding's throwing wide her gates to torture, fate stood out as the master dramatist. Making him do it himself! Working it out of a mere fool's trick! Blind?--_Blind?_ But his eyes fitted his brain so perfectly it was through them all knowledge came to him. They were the world's great channel to his mind. It was through his eyes he knew his fellow beings. The lifting of an eyebrow, a queer twist to a smile--those things always told him more than words. And--but here he staggered. The mind could get this, as it had all else, but on this the heart broke. _Ernestine!_--that smile--the love lights in her eyes--the glints of her dear, dear hair--The tube fell from his hand. His head sank to the table. He was buried now under an agony beyond all power to lift.