"And all for one pair of eyes opened to see light—and reality. Reality! I cannot get the word out of my brain. It seems to be written there in letters of fire."
"All for one pair of eyes.—And grief can kill so quickly—without giving us time to try a remedy?"
"I do not know," said Golfin, bewildered, confounded, helpless, in view of the mystic characters of the Book of Life and Death, which science may pore over but may not decipher its dark riddle.
"You do not know!" cried Florentina desperately. "Then why are you a doctor?"
"I do not know, I do not know!" he reiterated, striking his dishevelled head with his heavy hands.—"Yes, one thing I know, and that is that we know nothing but the skin-deep phenomena of life. I—I am a mender of eyes and nothing more."
He fixed his gaze with absorbed attention on the little figure which was hovering on the border-land between a living woman and a corpse. "Soul!" he exclaimed in a tone of bitter questioning: "What is passing in you now?"
Florentina burst into tears.
"The soul!" she murmured, and her head drooped on her breast: "It is fled!"
"No ..." said Teodoro, taking Nela's hand. "There is still some life left—but so little, that it would seem as if the soul were indeed far away and had left only the breath behind."