Now he began writing again, and her thoughts were bound up in his finger-ends, in the glow of the comradeship which was sufficient unto itself from day to day. She had learned to tell his mood and if the pain were particularly bad by the way he wrote. The letters were coming slowly, ponderingly, from his pencil-point. Something puzzled him. She looked over his shoulder just as his first sentence was finished. "Her message did not sound like Helen," he had written. Every nerve taut with suspense, she waited with quick breaths for what was to follow. "There was a certain style about everything that she did and said. I think that I could tell her hand from yours since I have become so sensitive to touch; though I suppose that with all the pain and the blindness I imagine all sorts of things which are not real." A leaping something within her that was for the moment irresistible, quick desire shining in her eyes, made her stretch out her hands toward him. Then her heart seemed to stop beating and she checked herself in the reaction of one who finds herself on the verge of treason. What might have been the effect on him if she told him the truth! All her work might have been undone. She gathered her wits, mastered her emotion, and lashed them together with her will. "It's time for you to close the writing and thinking shop for the day," she wrote on his arm; but when she started to take his pencil and pad he clung to them. He had something more which he must say, and it was best to yield to his wish, as she had learned. "The shutters of darkness are always down on that shop," he wrote, "but there is always a light within--you!" A glow came into her cheeks at the compliment. The light was the face of Henriette, her charm and grace, and the labour of Helen. It proved the wickedness of the impulse to tell him the truth. How dependent he was upon Henriette in his fight! "Now, that writing and thinking shop idea was like Helen," he was thinking--and thinking was much faster than writing and gave lazy minds more freedom to wander. "Isn't it odd? No, it's because I can't hear or speak or see--and I am tired." "Good-night!" said her hand-clasp out there in the darkness, but bringing her very near him. "Good-night!" his return clasp signalled back. Soon he was dozing. The pain was not sharp just then. He was nearly healed enough for another operation. "He ought to sleep well," Helen said to the night nurse as she went out, with a peculiar relief in going, such as she had never felt before.