Nela began to cry again.
"She is like an angel!" she said with a flood of tears. "She looks as if she had just come straight from Heaven. Body and soul she is exactly like the Holy Virgin Mary."
"Oh! do not exaggerate," said Pablo uneasily. "She cannot be so lovely as you say. Do not imagine that because I have no eyes I cannot feel who is beautiful and who is not."
"No, no, you cannot feel it, you do not understand.—Oh! you are mistaken, quite mistaken."
"No, no. She cannot be so beautiful," the blind lad insisted, turning very pale as he spoke. "Nela, darling of my heart, do you know what my father told me? That if I recover my sight I am to marry Florentina."
Nela could not answer; her tears continued to flow in silence, pouring down her burning cheeks and dropping on her hands. But not even the bitterest tears could give expression or relief to her intense grief. It was immeasurable, infinite, that was all she knew.
"I know why you are crying so much," the blind youth said holding her hands very tightly in his own. "But my father will not insist on making me marry against my will. For me there is no wife in the world but you. When my eyes can see, they will care for no beauty but your heavenly face; all others will be but shades, too remote and dim to attract my gaze. Oh God! what is a human face like? How does the soul stand revealed in flesh? If light cannot avail to give another aspect to thought and fancy, of what use is it at all? That which we conceive of and that which is—are they not one and the same thing? Are not the idea and the form the same to each other as fire and heat? Can they be separated? And can you cease to be the fairest in the world to me, the sweetest and best beloved, when I am lord of the vast domain of the visible?"
Florentina now rejoined them, and they talked as they went home; but nothing more was said of sufficient interest to be set down here.
[CHAPTER XVI.]
THE VOW.
Nothing of importance occurred on the two following days, but then there came one on which the deed was done, the wonderful, crowning, fateful deed. Teodoro Golfin, in whose hands the surgeon's knife was as the chisel of a Genius, had attempted to amend one of Nature's most delicate works. Unflinching and calm he took possession, as it were, in virtue of his science and experience, of the marvellous speck in which the glorious scheme of the Universe is epitomized and concentrated. The task before him was nothing less than to stand face to face with the mystery of Life; to investigate and discover the causes which hindered a living eye from taking cognizance of things visible. For this a firm soul was needed and a tender hand. The delicate tissue of the cornea must be divided, the crystalline lens removed, carefully avoiding the hyaloid membrane and the vitreous humor; the dimensions of the pupil must be increased by an incision, and the condition of the inner chamber of the eye ascertained by induction or by examination.