‘Thank God! say I too. This that you suffer from is an acute form of inflammation of the optic nerve. It may of course end badly; in permanent loss of sight. But I hope—I believe, that in your case it will not be so. You are young, and you are immensely strong; not merely muscularly, but in constitution. I can see that you have been an athlete, and no mean one either. All this will stand to you. But it will take time. It will need all your own help; all the calm restraint of your body and your mind. I am doing all that science knows; you must do the rest!’ He waited, giving time to the other to realise his ideas. Harold lay still for a long time before he spoke:
‘Doctor.’ The voice was so strangely different that the other was more hopeful at once. He had feared opposition, or conflict of some kind. He answered as cheerily as he could:
‘Yes! I am listening.’
‘You are a good fellow; and I am grateful to you, both for what you have done and what you have told me. I cannot say how grateful just yet; hope unmans me at present. But I think you deserve that I should tell you the truth!’ The other nodded; he forgot that the speaker could not see.
‘I was not intending to commit suicide. Such an idea didn’t even enter my head. To me, suicide is the resource of a coward. I have been in too many tight places to ever fear that.’
‘Then in the name of goodness why were you trying to get out of that window?’
‘I wanted to escape; to get away!’
‘In your shirt and trousers; and they are not over much! Without even slippers!’ A faint smile curled round the lips of the injured man. Hope was beginning to help already.
‘Even that way!’
‘But man alive! you were going to your death. How could you expect to get away in such an outfit without being discovered? When you were missed the whole countryside would have been up, and even before the hue-and-cry the first person who saw you would have taken charge of you.’