"I would." Peter's answer should have left no room for doubt. He was conscious, as the old man proceeded with the story, that it was the drama of Walter Lord's life. Sometimes he forgot Peter altogether; at other times he was aware of the younger man only as a ship that passes in the night. He spoke to him in passing. It did not matter how much he told. They would never see each other again, in all human probability. As one sometimes may tell a stranger the thoughts of an over-burdened heart, thoughts which would for ever remain hidden from the nearest and dearest, so Walter Lord told Peter, without himself realizing it, the story of his life's tragedy--the story of Anne Blakeslie. "I never knew when she saw Winthrop Curwood first. Not that it matters." The old voice was low and gentle. Throughout the pronoun "she" was spoken with such reverence as to suggest that it would have been written with a capital--as if, instead of Anne Blakeslie, a deity were its antecedent--"She must have known him pretty well when I saw them together for the first time.... I was going up to her house one day, soon after I got back from school, and.... They were standing just where a little wood road from up the mountain comes in to the sawmill road, about two miles west of the village.... They didn't see me, though I was in plain sight, a hundred yards away.... He was standing with his hat off--and a look on his face.... It was a fine face, too.... And just then he reached out, sort of uncertainly, and took her hand.... I thought I'd better go home, and come back to see Anne some other day--perhaps. But she caught sight of me before I'd gone more than a few steps, and called to me. I went back, of course--and I saw him again, climbing up the steep road, it was hardly more than a trail, and feeling ahead of him with a long stick. It was then I saw, from the way he moved, that he was blind----" "Blind!" echoed Peter, aghast! "Blind." "Yes," said the old man, sadly. "He was stone blind. Anne told me about him, at once, with tears standing in her eyes. He had a little house over on the far side of the mountain, and lived there all alone. He had come there, she said, while he could still see a little, and built the place with some help from a man down in Job's Corners, who still brought up his supplies. Nobody knew anything about him except it was easy to see, she said, that he was a gentleman, and educated. And indeed he was. I saw him, myself, several times after they--after they were married." He paused on that word, and the golden sun, freeing itself from the passing cloud, lit up the kind old face, with its pitiful, dyed hair, the quaintly youthful garments, and made of them a thing touching, tender, wistful in its appeal. He went on, almost immediately: