“'I have a home. Will you show me where it is? While I was blind I could feel my way to it; but, now that I can see, I feel lost--all things are so changed to me. Please lead me there--I want to see with my own eyes what a home is like.' “So I took his hand in mine and we went toward it, and the three others who were there followed after us. “Madam, his home--the only home he had, for so far as we knew, he had no living kinspeople--was a room in that big barn of an asylum. I led him to the door of it. It was a barren enough room--you know how these institutions are apt to be furnished, and this room was no exception to the rule. Bare walls, a bare floor, bare uncurtained windows, a bed, a chair or two, a bare table--a sort of hygienic and sanitary brutality governed all its appointments. “I imagine the lowest servant in your employ has a more attractively furnished room than this was. Now, though, it was flooded with the afterglow, which poured in at the windows; that soft light alone redeemed its hideousness of outline and its poverty of furnishings. “He halted at the threshold. We know what home means to most of us. How much must it have meant, then, to him! He could see the walls closing round to encompass him in their friendly companionship; he could see the roof coming down to protect him. “'Home!' he said to himself in a half whisper, under his breath. 'What a beautiful word home is! And what a beautiful place my home is!' “Nobody gave the signal, none of us made the suggestion by word or gesture; but with one accord we four, governed by the same impulse, left him and went away. We felt in an inarticulate way that he was entitled to be alone; that no curious eye had any right to study his emotions in this supreme moment. “In an hour we went back. He was lying where he had fallen--across the threshold of his room. On his face was a beatific peace, a content unutterable--and he was dead. Joy I think had burst his heart. That bit of plaster you hold in your hand is his death mask.” The doctor finished his tale. He bent forward in his chair to see the look upon his caller's face. She stood up; and she was a creature transformed and radiant! “Doctor,” she said--and even her voice was altered--“I am going home--home to my husband and my children and my friends. I believe I have found a cure for my--my trouble. Rather, you have found it for me here to-day. You have taught me a lesson. You have made me see things I could not see before--hear things I could not hear before. For I have been blind and deaf, as blind and as deaf as this man was--yes, blinder than he ever was. But now”--she cried out the words in a burst of revelation--“but now--why, doctor, I have everything to live for--haven't I?” “Yes, madam,” he said gravely; “you have everything to live for. If only we knew it, if only we could realise it, all of us in this world have everything to live for.”