“How impossible!” she exclaimed.
“And humane,” he suggested.
The word caught her attention.
“It would be almost that,” she admitted reluctantly.
He waited. He did not care to press the point by argument. It was merely a suggestion born of the moment—born of the acute necessity of doing something at once. But she must decide for herself. He had done his best, and however it turned this picture was worth remembering.
At first it did not seem to her even a possibility, but once she recovered a little from the shock of her surprise, once she had stripped it of its novelty, and, gazing into his honest eyes, considered it merely as an heroic measure for easing the sick, blind man to his end, she found herself forgetting everything else but the peace it might bring. She, better than he, knew that it was possible.
“But,” she exclaimed, “it is such a bit of trickery.”
“Nothing else,” he assured her, “or diplomacy if you wish to dignify it.”
“If—if we succeeded it would make his last days very pleasant.”
“I would do my best.”