"What is it, Phil?" Helen asked him.
He would not attempt to speak again. He had forgotten himself when he made that gurgling outcry. It was one of the idiosyncrasies of his sick man's pride that he would not try to talk before the one who wrote on his arm. The sounds that he emitted through the bandages and silver harness must be like a stuttering idiot's lisp, as he expressed it, and he thought of himself as repulsive enough to her brave eyes without that. Speech would return normally, the throat expert had said, when the removal of Bricktop's apparatus should give it a chance.
"Light!" he wrote. "Just light, without seeing you or where I am. It seems as if I were hung up in the ether, without seeing sky or earth and light held me up and I ate it and drank it and breathed it. Oh, it is good, good!"
"Yes, good!" repeated phlegmatic, kindly Mr. Eyes, who had brought light to many people for large fees from the rich and for nothing for those who live in the alleys. Light was his business. Yet he, too, must find some outlet for his emotion, which was to pat Helen on the head. General Ears had taken only a thousand yards, while General Eyes felt as triumphant as if he had taken five miles of first line trench, ten thousand prisoners and a hundred guns. It was the knock-out blow for the little pain devils.
When he had made some experiments and put on fresh compresses and was about to go, he said, choosing his words carefully:
"I think that I may safely say, barring unforeseen complications, that he will entirely recover his sight with time. How about that?" he added, to Helen.
Her eyes were moist with happiness. She was incapable of speaking. Her first coherent thought was that Phil himself did not yet know.
"Victory!" she wrote on his arm. "You will completely recover your sight, on the high authority of Mr. Eyes himself."
For a space he made no movement. His consciousness was absorbing a transcendent fact. Helen sat beside him, waiting. Henriette, who had remained all the while in the background, silent except for a prolonged cry of delight, came nearer and stood on the other side of him, also waiting. At length he wrote:
"Soon I shall see you!"