“You’ll never know what it felt like to hear your voice call to me, to feel you pulling me up. I’d only just dropped a few minutes before, but I’d never have struggled up. It would have been the end.” She trembled in the memory, and he patted her hand. “I don’t know why a man like you lives off here in this wild place, but thank God, you do live here! Though,” she added with wistfulness, twisting her soft mouth, “though I can’t ever quite see why God should care much for a Sylvie Doone.” She touched the lids of her closed eyes. “I wonder why it doesn’t worry me more not to be able to see. Now that the pain’s gone, I don’t seem to care much.”
“Thank God. Perhaps, though,” he added half-grudgingly, “in a few days you’ll see again.”
She smiled. “I’d just love to see you. You must be wonderful!”
“What makes you think that?” he asked, his warped face glowing.
“You’re so strong and young, such thick hair, such finely shaped hands and such a voice.” Sylvie’s associates had been of a profession that deals perpetually in personalities. “If I’d been blind a long time, I suppose I could just run my hand over your face, and I’d know what you look like. But I can’t tell a thing.” She felt for his face and brushed it eagerly with her fingers, laughing at herself. “I just know that you have thick eyelashes and are clean-shaven. Is Bella your wife? And that big little boy your son?”
He started. “No, she’s a faithful thing, the boy’s nurse. And the kid’s my young brother—a great gawk of a boy for his age, a regular bean-pole.”
“It’s so hard to tell anything about people if you can’t see them. I wouldn’t have thought he was so big. Is he about fourteen or fifteen? He speaks so low and gently; he might be any age.”
“And a man’s height—pretty near too big to lick, though he needs it.”
“And Bella, what’s she like?”
“A dried-up mummy of a woman.”