'At first I could not be sure of my surmise, for when I used the ophthalmoscope your suffering was too recent to disclose the cause I looked for. Now I am fairly sure of it. What I have since heard from you has convinced me; your having suffered from rheumatic fever, and the recrudescence of the rheumatic pain after your terrible experience of the fire and that long chilling swim with so seemingly hopeless an end to it; the symptoms which I have since noticed, though they have not been as enlightening to me as they might be. Your disease, as I have diagnosed it, is an obscure one and not common. I have not before been able to study a case. All these things give me great hopes.' 'Thank God! Thank God!' the voice from the bed was now a whisper. 'Thank God! say I too. This that you suffer from is an acute form of inflammation of the optic nerve. It may of course end badly; in permanent loss of sight. But I hope--I believe, that in your case it will not be so. You are young, and you are immensely strong; not merely muscularly, but in constitution. I can see that you have been an athlete, and no mean one either. All this will stand to you. But it will take time. It will need all your own help; all the calm restraint of your body and your mind. I am doing all that science knows; you must do the rest!' He waited, giving time to the other to realise his ideas. Harold lay still for a long time before he spoke: 'Doctor.' The voice was so strangely different that the other was more hopeful at once. He had feared opposition, or conflict of some kind. He answered as cheerily as he could: 'Yes! I am listening.' 'You are a good fellow; and I am grateful to you, both for what you have done and what you have told me. I cannot say how grateful just yet; hope unmans me at present. But I think you deserve that I should tell you the truth!' The other nodded; he forgot that the speaker could not see. 'I was not intending to commit suicide. Such an idea didn't even enter my head. To me, suicide is the resource of a coward. I have been in too many tight places to ever fear that.' 'Then in the name of goodness why were you trying to get out of that window?' 'I wanted to escape; to get away!' 'In your shirt and trousers; and they are not over much! Without even slippers!' A faint smile curled round the lips of the injured man. Hope was beginning to help already. 'Even that way!' 'But man alive! you were going to your death. How could you expect to get away in such an outfit without being discovered? When you were missed the whole countryside would have been up, and even before the hue- and-cry the first person who saw you would have taken charge of you.' 'I know! I know! I had thought of it all. But I was willing to chance it. I had my own reasons!' He was silent a while. The Doctor was silent too. Each man was thinking in his own way. Presently the Doctor spoke: