"Twice," said Durrance. "What an escape! You see, Calder, I shall be more trouble even than the man I told you of. I am not clever. I can't sit in a chair and amuse myself by thinking, not having any intellect to buck about. I have lived out of doors and hard, and that's the only sort of life that suits me. I tell you, Calder, you won't be very anxious for much of my society in a year's time," and he laughed again and with the same harshness.
"Oh, stop that," said Calder; "I will read the rest of your letters to you."
He read them, however, without much attention to their contents. His mind was occupied with the two letters from Ethne Eustace, and he was wondering whether there was any deeper emotion than mere friendship hidden beneath the words. Girls refused men for all sorts of queer reasons which had no sense in them, and very often they were sick and sorry about it afterwards; and very often they meant to accept the men all the time.
"I must answer the letters from Ireland," said Durrance, when he had finished. "The rest can wait."
Calder held a sheet of paper upon the desk and told Durrance when he was writing on a slant and when he was writing on the blotting-pad; and in this way Durrance wrote to tell Ethne that a sunstroke had deprived him of his sight. Calder took that letter away. But he took it to the hospital and asked for the Syrian doctor. The doctor came out to him, and they walked together under the trees in front of the building.
"Tell me the truth," said Calder.
The doctor blinked behind his spectacles.
"The optic nerve is, I think, destroyed," he replied.
"Then there is no hope?"
"None, if my diagnosis is correct."