She had tried to keep back the tears, but they came now, so that her body quivered with the intensity of her emotion. "I'm going to see, darling!" she whispered; "I know I'm going to see again. I wouldn't let them remove the bandages until you came." "Sure you are!" Langford said, gruffly. "And you'll have better sight than ever before! Both kinds of sight, just as you had before!" "I was afraid you might be hurt, darling!" Joan Langford whispered, running her forefinger down his wet cheek as she held his head close. "I used the other sight that makes me so different, and terrifies people much more than it should!" "You should not have done that!" Langford said, scowling; "I was in no real danger!" "You were being hunted like a criminal!" She turned her head toward Dr. Crendon as she spoke. The physician looked away, feeling her gaze on him through the bandages. "The law of compensation, child," he said, gently. "Mutants are clairvoyant; their vision is piercingly sharp where vision matters most. When nature confers a priceless gift she sometimes withdraws a lesser one; no one knows why, not even the biologists." He smiled, "There I go, personifying the impersonal again. Perhaps ordinary sight will someday be vestigial in all of us." Langford glanced up. The physician was pressing his finger to his lips and gesturing toward the door. Langford got quickly to his feet. A chill wind seemed to blow into the room, driving all the warmth from his mind. Just outside the door Dr. Crendon turned and spoke in a cautious whisper. "I haven't given up hope!" he said. "But the chances are not too good, we don't know why, but mutants have defective vision from birth even when their eyes are normal." Langford nodded, "I know that, doctor!" The physician's voice became gentler. "We know so little about mutants. Fifty thousand of them in the world, perhaps--born too early or too late! An inward vision that can pierce the barriers of sense and see to the heart of things. And an outward vision that's defective, faltering, almost a blind man's vision. Clairvoyance and failing sight--it just doesn't make sense." "Joan makes sense," Langford said. "If she were stone blind I'd still worship her." Dr. Crendon held his hands straight out before him and looked down at them. "I did my best," he said, simply. "There were slight peculiarities of structure in the choroid but I'm sure that the new cornea will adjust. It's the retina itself, the innermost nervous tunic of the eye, that I'm worried about." He paused, then went on quickly: "A mutant's retina is hypersensitive. It responds to light in a peculiar way and has a tendency to distort images. But that distortion vanishes when the mind becomes really active." Langford looked at him. "Just what are you trying to tell me?"