A note is struck similar to one used later by Lord Dunsany in “A Night at an Inn.” Some invisible force is pushing open the door. The servant protests that it is not she, as she is standing three yards away from the door. The Grandfather is conscious of a new presence. “And who is that sitting there?” he asks. “But there is no one there,” he is told. But he will not believe them, maintaining that in pity they are deceiving him. A ray of moon-light penetrates, throwing strange gleams. The clock strikes midnight; at the last stroke there is a sound as of some one rising in haste. Cries of terror from the child’s room: quick and heavy steps. Then silence. The door of the sick woman’s room slowly opens, and the Sister of Mercy appears on the threshold. She bows as she makes the sign of the Cross. In “Les Aveugles” Maeterlinck turned from a typically Flemish setting to a forest on a small island—“a very ancient northern forest, eternal of aspect, beneath a sky profoundly starred.” Six old blind men are on the right, and six old blind women on the left. They are from a Home for the Blind and they are in the charge of a priest—a very old priest, wrapped in a wide black cloak, and whose eyes, “dumb and fixed, no longer gaze at the visible side of eternity, and seem bleeding beneath a multitude of immemorial sorrows and of tears.” Fear is in the hearts of the priest’s charges. They are startled by the flutter of wings, by the touch of the falling snow, by the barking of dogs. They understand nothing save the sound of the sea and they do not know how near that is. In the priest’s company they have been exploring their island, which has “a mountain that no one has climbed, valleys with no one to go down to, and caves that have not been entered to this day.” They know not yet that the priest is dead, but they are conscious that something has happened to him. They offer conjectures, they dig into the past, they deplore their state. At length one of the men is led by a dog to the center, where the body of the priest is. He touches a face. The others follow and recognise by feeling the features of their protector. What are they to do? The only seeing eyes are those of a child at its mother’s breast. The child cries at a noise, and they think that it must be something and move towards the sound that has provoked the cry. Their hope is that the men from the light-house will see them. At last the footsteps stop. “Who are you?” asks the child’s mother. But only silence. “Have pity on us,” cries the oldest blind woman.