She sat for some time in the undignified
position which Miss Mowlem had described
with such graphic correctness to her mother,
then drew back a little, raised her head, and
looked earnestly into the quiet, meditative
face of the blind man.

"Lenny, you are very silent this morning,"
she said. "What are you thinking about? If
you will tell me all your thoughts, I will tell
you all mine."

"Would you really care to hear all my
thoughts?" asked Leonard.

"Yes; all. I shall be jealous of any
thoughts that you keep to yourself. Tell me
what you were thinking of just now! Me?"

"Not exactly of you."

"More shame for you. Are you tired of
me in eight days? I have not thought of
anybody but you ever since we have been
here. Ah! you laugh. O, Lenny, I do
love you so; how can I think of anybody
but you? No! I shan't kiss you. I
want to know what you were thinking
about first."

"Of a dream, Rosamond, that I had last
night. Ever since the first days of my blindness
—Why, I thought you were not going
to kiss me again till I had told you what I
was thinking about!"

"I can't help kissing you, Lenny, when you
talk of the loss of your sight. Tell me, my
poor love, do I help to make up for that loss?
Are you happier than you used to be? and
have I some share in making that happiness,
though it is ever so little?"

She turned her head away as she spoke,
but Leonard was too quick for her. His
inquiring fingers touched her cheek. "Rosamond,
you are crying," he said.

"I crying!" she answered with a sudden
assumption of gaiety. "No," she continued,
after a moment's pause. "I will never
deceive you, love, even in the veriest trifle.
My eyes serve for both of us now, don't they?
you depend on me for all that your touch
fails to tell you, and I must never be unworthy
of my trust—must I? I did cry,
Lenny—but only a very little. I don't know
how it was, but I never, in all my life,
seemed to pity you and feel for you as I did
just at that moment. Never mind, I've
done now. Go on—do go on with what you
were going to say."

"I was going to say, Rosamond, that I
have observed one curious thing about
myself since I lost my sight. I dream a
great deal, but I never dream of myself as a
blind man. I often visit in my dreams places
that I saw, and people whom I knew when
I had my sight, and though I feel as much
myself, at those visionary times, as I am now
when I am wide-awake, I never by any
chance feel blind. I wander about all sorts
of old walks in my sleep, and never grope
my way. I talk to all sorts of old friends in
my sleep, and see the expression in their
faces which, waking, I shall never see again.
I have lost my sight more than a year now,
and yet it was like the shock of a new discovery
to me to wake up last night from my
dream, and remember suddenly that I was
blind."

"What dream was it, Lenny?"

"Only a dream of the place where I first
met you when we were both children. I
saw the glen, as it was years ago, with
the great twisted roots of the trees, and
the blackberry bushes twining about them
in a still shadowed light that came through
thick leaves from the rainy sky. I saw the
mud on the walk in the middle of the glen,
with the marks of the cows' hoofs in some
places, and the sharp circles in others where
some countrywomen had been lately trudging
by on pattens. I saw the muddy water
running down on either side of the path after
the shower; and I saw you, Rosamond, a
naughty girl, all covered with clay and wet—
just as you were in the reality—soiling your
bright blue pelissè and your pretty little
chubby hands by making a dam to stop the
running water, and laughing at the indignation
of your nursemaid when she tried to pull
you away and take you home. I saw all that,
exactly as it really was in the bygone time,
but strangely enough I did not see myself as
the boy I then was. You were a little girl,
and the glen was in its old neglected state,
and yet, though I was all in the past so far, I
was in the present as regarded myself.
Throughout the whole dream I was uneasily
conscious of being a grown man—of being, in
short, exactly what I am now, excepting
always that I was not blind."

"What a memory you must have, love, to
be able to recal all those little circumstances,
after the years that have passed since that
wet day in the glen! How well you recollect
what I was as a child! Do you remember
in the same vivid way, what I looked
like a year ago, when you saw me—
O, Lenny, it almost  breaks my heart to think
of it!—when you saw me for the last
time?"

"Do I remember, Rosamond! My last
look at your face has painted your portrait
on my memory in colours that can never
change. I have many pictures in my mind,
but your picture is the clearest and brightest
of all."

"And it is the picture of me at my best—
painted in my youth, dear, when my face
was always confessing how I loved you,
though my lips said nothing. There is some
consolation in that thought. When years
have passed over us both, Lenny, and when
time begins to set his mark on me, you will
not say to yourself, 'My Rosamond is beginning
to fade; she grows less and less like
what she was when I married her.' I shall
never grow old, love, for you! The bright
young picture in your mind will still be my
picture when my cheeks are wrinkled and
my hair is grey."