Next, they were doing something to his eyes, which were finally covered with a compress. The people out in that silent blackness were divided into classes: She and they. Then they were doing something to his ears. The eye and the ear experts said the same as Bricktop. Both would try; for all three were big men, who said just what they meant. Phil, guessing their purpose, waited for the message on his arm. "It is all right," she wrote again. "They say you will see again and hear again as well as ever." He believed her with the faith of those men in the court who followed Bricktop with their confident eyes. Soon the pain came; needlelike shoots of broken nerves that had been numbed by shock. A thousand needles sewing, pricking, leaping, burning, drowning the hammer-beats! "But I'll stick it!" thought Phil. CHAPTER XXIX IN HER PLACE AGAIN The numbing horror of it--and to have come into her life--hers! Enveloping horror, the horror of war personified, drove Henriette out of the ward, on with mechanical steps toward a deserted part of the beach, where she could be alone and think before she faced Lady Truckleford's lot. Her gospel of life had been a gospel of beauty: a delight in her own beauty as a source of power; a dislike of all things that were not comely; a choice of surroundings in the fashioning of a beautiful world, selected and detached in a charming egoism, where she was supreme. Phil had come from afar and played a knightly part; she had fitted him into that world. It was the end--the end of upward glances into his eyes; of profile turned in the certainty of holding his impelled, prolonged regard of admiration; of sauntering in woodland paths; of rhythmic swing in step across the fields; of fair afternoons with him posing and herself posing as she leisurely played with her brush--of the most delectable of all her experiences. Those finely-chiselled features which she had painted, which had been the security of masculine strength in her fright as he carried her to the cover of the gully, their elation when she spoke of the woman who waited when the man went out to fight--and that monstrous fact against a pillow in the hospital! War had made its test in kind. All the soft, pampered years were in reckoning for her, as the suffering years were for Helen. Her instinct was to fly to her quiet studio in Paris, as a child flies indoors to its mother from a storm dragon; but public opinion, personified to her distraction by Lady Truckleford's lot, would not permit this. Her friends knew that he was her cousin; and Lady Violet's teasing had been the reflection of general knowledge of the situation between the two. No one would more quickly appreciate than they in their own beautiful world that any conventional outcome would now be impossible, yet none readier to point the finger at heartlessness. They would expect devoted attention to him for a certain period in his ghastly misfortune.