She found Clotilde alone next day at the lunch-hour, her husband being almost always late, especially when he had to go to fetch the blinded man. At last she recognized the voice of the handsome George in the anteroom, and saw him pushing before him, as a ventriloquist guides his automaton, a tall young man, neither handsome nor plain, in the uniform of a captain of light infantry, and with closed eyes. The blinded man bowed, and clasped the hand that Clotilde laid within his own; George explained to him that one of their friends was with them, a young war-widow, Mme. Jacquelin. The blind man also pressed the hand that Odette extended to him. He already knew the apartment with minute exactness. He walked to the table without aid, almost without feeling his way; and recognized each flower by its perfume; they directed his fingers to the primroses which have no perfume, and one would have said that his eager fingers recognized the table decorations as strange little mute personages. After a brief touch he knew the precise situation of each object; with the blade of his knife he recognized the nature of the food on his plate, and cut it adroitly. Possibly he might have been able to help himself, like others, from the dish presented by the servant, but he was spared the necessity of this feat by the question: "What do you prefer, captain?" He talked freely, almost gayly, though with an evident effort. He appeared to be intelligent without ever having been cultivated; but neither his person nor his mind revealed anything remarkable. He would doubtless have been a man like any other if he had not been blinded. Odette shuddered on looking at those closed eyelids on the face of a man in whom one divined, notwithstanding his effort to conceal it, a secret suffering. Yet his voice was not that of a man who bore a mystery about with him; his suffering probably did not attain to those higher regions which a rich imagination transforms into torture-chambers for men unhappily deprived of the light of day; he did not dream of romantic sunsets, of the contemplation of the celestial vault, or of Correggio's sunlight, nor even of the beauty of houris. As George was offering to his touch the cigars in a box, he whispered in his ear: "You have been lunching with a pretty-woman, old fellow, don't you know?" "Your wife? I should think so!" "My wife, yes, but the other one, young, very pretty!" The blind man seemed to reflect, shook his head and said: "That always gives pleasure." "Her husband," George went on, "was killed in the early days----" "Has she children?" asked the blinded man. "They had only been married three or four years; they would have had----" "Perhaps she loved him too much? That sometimes happens, it appears." "Yes," said George. The blinded man turned his closed eyes, like an extinguished lighthouse, in Odette's direction. He experienced a curious feeling, almost envy, of the dead man who had been so much beloved.