"It's very slight," replied the Periwinkle—as indeed it was,—"and I'm quite as warm out here as in bed. May I borrow your glass?"
He took the telescope and steadied it against a pillar. The distant semaphore began waving, and the group of convalescents settled down to listen. But no sound came from the boy. He was standing with the eye-piece held to his right eye, motionless as a statue. A light wind fluttered the gaudy pyjamas, and their owner lowered the glass with a little frown, half-puzzled, half-irritated.
"I—it's—there's something wrong—" he began, and abruptly put the glass to his left eye. "Ah, that's better...." He commenced reading, but in a minute or two his voice faltered and trailed off into silence. He changed the glass to his right, and back to his left eye. Then, lowering it, turned a white scared face to the seated group. "I'm afraid I can't read any more," he said in a curiously dry voice; "I—it hurts my eyes."
He returned the glass to its owner and hopped back into bed, where he sat with the clothes drawn up under his chin, sweating lightly.
After a while he closed his left eye and looked cautiously round the room. The tops of objects appeared indistinctly out of a grey mist. It was like looking at a partly fogged negative. He closed his right eye and repeated the process with the other. His field of vision was clear then, except for a speck of grey fog that hung threateningly in the upper left-hand corner.
By dinner-time he could see nothing with the right eye, and the fog had closed on half the left eye's vision.
At tea-time he called the Sister on duty—
"My eyes—hurt ... frightfully." Thus the Periwinkle, striving to hedge with Destiny.
"Do they?" sympathised the Sister. "I'll tell the Surgeon when he comes round to-night, and he'll give you something for them. I shouldn't read for the present if I were you."
The Periwinkle smiled grimly, as if she had made a joke, and lay back, every nerve in his body strung to breaking-point.