"I should like to tell you--only I know I shall say it wrong, and you will think me an odd girl; or unfeeling; which is worse." "I should do nothing of the sort. But I'll tell you what I should think--what I have thought all this time I have been hearing your voice--I merely mention it as a thing of pathological interest...." "Go on." "I should think it didn't matter what you said so long as you went on speaking. Because whenever I hear your voice I can shut my eyes and forget that I am blind." "Is that empty compliment, or are you in earnest?" "I was jesting a minute ago, but now I am in earnest. I mean what I say. Your voice takes the load off my heart and the darkness off my brain, and we are standing again by that stone bridge over yonder--Arthur's Bridge--and I see you in all your beauty--oh! such beauty--as I look up from Ply's cut collar against the sunset sky. That was my last hour of vision, and its memory will go with me to the grave. And now when I hear your voice, it all comes back to me, and the terrible darkness has vanished--or the sense of it anyhow!..." "If that is so you shall hear it until your sight comes back--it will--it must!" "How if it never comes back? How if I remain as I am now for life?" "I shall not lose my voice." How it came about neither could ever say; but each knew that it happened then, just at that turn in the conversation, and that no one came rushing into the drawing-room as they easily might have done--this lax structure of language was employed later in reference to it--nor did any of the thousand interruptions occur that might have occurred. Mrs. Bailey might have come to Mr. Torrens to know how many g's there were in agreeable, or a tea-collector might have prowled in to add relics to her collection, or even the sound of the carriage afar--inaudible by man--might have caused Achilles to requisition the opening of the drawing-room door, that he might rush away to sanction its arrival. Two guardian angels--the story thinks--stopped any of these things happening. What did happen was that Gwen and Adrian, who a moment before were nominally a lady and gentleman chatting on a sofa near the piano, whose separation involved no consequences definable for either, were standing speechless in each other's arms--speechless but waiting for the power to speak. For nobody can articulate whose heart is thumping out of all reason. He has to wait--or she, as may be. One of each is needed to develope an earthquake of this particular kind.