"This is Helen. She has just come to see you and has come often and thinks that you are making the bravest kind of a fight."
He caught her hand in both of his and shook it warmly in his happiness.
"You don't write as well as Henriette," he wrote in reply, "but I have a lot of experience and could read it. What are you drawing? What cartoons are you making? What mischief are you up to generally?"
"I will tell you when I can write better. Now I shall be going so as not to tire you. Good-night!"
She gave his hand another clasp and turned to Helen, smiling, as she said: "I'm in your place, now, as well as you being in mine!" not forgetting to press her lips to Helen's before withdrawing.
She had gone through it all with a graceful facility and self-command, while Helen had found herself unable even to murmur "Good-night." For an instant, again alone with Phil, she felt that she also was groping in a noiseless and sightless world and that she, too, was maimed. Henriette was beautiful—oh, very beautiful! It was no wonder that men fell in love with her. Just to look at her must make any man want to live. Only to the blind could she herself be beautiful. If his sight should come back, it would be the end of the walks in the court and the writing of messages for him. There was dreadful mockery in the thought when he became well he might think that she who had shared his pain in the dark night cared more for making cartoons than for him. For an instant revolt flamed up in her mind; but only for an instant. It was smothered by the appeal of his helplessness as she looked around at him.
Now he began writing again, and her thoughts were bound up in his finger-ends, in the glow of the comradeship which was sufficient unto itself from day to day. She had learned to tell his mood and if the pain were particularly bad by the way he wrote. The letters were coming slowly, ponderingly, from his pencil-point. Something puzzled him. She looked over his shoulder just as his first sentence was finished.
"Her message did not sound like Helen," he had written.
Every nerve taut with suspense, she waited with quick breaths for what was to follow.
"There was a certain style about everything that she did and said. I think that I could tell her hand from yours since I have become so sensitive to touch; though I suppose that with all the pain and the blindness I imagine all sorts of things which are not real."