The last words broke from him unconsciously. He sat chilled with horror at his own speech, but knew he had to go on. "I am going to do what shall leave us both unhappy as long as we live. I'll give you back your eyes if I can." "I am helpless." She spoke simply. "Yes! Why, if I even look at you, I feel I'm an eavesdropper, I'm stealing. You can't see in my face what your face puts there--you can't see my eyes with yours. You can't understand how you've made me know things I never did know until I saw you. Why, cruel? yes! And now you're asking me to be still more cruel. And I'm going to be." "Don't!" she broke out. "Oh, God! Don't! Please--you must not talk. I thought you were different from this." "And yet you have asked me a dozen times what's wrong here. Why, everything's wrong! That man loves you because he can see you--any man would--but you don't love him, because you _haven't_ seen him. You're not a woman to him at all, but an abstraction. He's not a man to you at all, but an imagination. _That's_ not love of man and woman. But when you have back your eyes,--_then_ you're in shape to compete with the best women in the world for the best man in the world. That's love! That's marriage! That's right! Nothing else is." He paused horrified. Her voice was icy. "I asked you what was wrong here. I begin to see now. You spoke the truth--everything is wrong." "You'll hate me all your life and I hate myself now as I never have before in my life--despise myself. What a mockery we've made of it all. God help those who see!" She sat silent for a very long time. "You say I shall be able to see him--my husband?" [Illustration: "You say I shall be able to see him--my husband?"] "Yes, I think so," he said. "And you also?" "No! Him, but not me. You never will. I'll be an imagination forever. You'll never see me at all." "Under what star of sadness was I born?" said Mary Gage, simply. "What a problem!" "Good-by," he replied. "I don't need to wait." She held out her hands to him, gropingly. "Going?" "Yes. I'm coming back, week after next, to get you. I'll not talk this way ever again. Don't forgive me--you can't. "You'll have to go down to our hospital, perhaps for a couple of weeks," he concluded. He stepped from the room so silently, passed so quickly on the turf, that she was not sure he had gone. He never saw her hands reach out, did not hear her voice: "No, no! I'll not go! Let me be as I am!" CHAPTER XXVI THE WAYS OF MR. GARDNER Two figures stood regarding Doctor Barnes as his car turned into the willow lane out-bound for the highway. "Why didn't he say good-by, anyways, when he left?" commented Wid, turning to Annie Squires. "Went off like he'd forgot something." "That's his way," replied Annie, rolling down her sleeves. They had met as she was passing from the barracks cabin. "He's a live wire, anyways. God knows this country needs them."