“And so my lesson came home to me,” he said. “A month ago I said, as you know, ‘I will hate, I will injure.’ A fortnight ago I said, ‘What good is that?’ But now, when poor Tom, who was all kind and all gentle, had to be taught like that, with those battering hoofs, that pain must be and that one must accept it and sorrow, and not leave them out of life, now I say, ‘Can I help? May not I bear a little of it?’”
He got up.
“You don’t know me,” he said. “I don’t know myself. But I suppose this is how such a thing comes to one. I have been in an outer darkness: I have been black and bitter and all my life before that I was hard. That, I suppose, was needful for me. I don’t think I am going to be a prig, but if that is so, perhaps it doesn’t much matter. But I do know this, that I am sorry for poor things.”
Mrs. Home said nothing for the moment; then she turned her eyes away as she spoke.
“You have not heard then, dear?” she said.
“It was in the paper this evening,” she said. “I know no more than that. Evelyn was shot in the face yesterday.”
Then her voice quivered.
“They think he will live,” she said. “But they know he will be blind. Oh, Philip, think of Evelyn blind!”
