"All right," returned Allan, serenely. "We can keep him in the living-room of our six-room apartment and have his dinner sent in from the nearest table d'oat. For breakfast, he can come out into the salle à manger and eat cereals with us."
"You're absolutely incorrigible," she sighed. "This is the river road. Follow it until I tell you where to turn."
Within half an hour, the horse came to a full stop of his own accord in front of the grey, weather-worn house where Barbara lived. He was cropping at a particularly enticing clump of grass when Eloise alighted.
"Going to push?" queried Allan, lazily.
"No, this is the place. Come on. You bring two of the suit-cases and I'll take the other."
Observations
The blind man was not there at the moment, but came in while Miriam was upstairs packing Miss Wynne's recent additions to her wardrobe. Doctor Conrad had been observing Barbara keenly as they talked of indifferent things. Outwardly, he was calm and professional, but within, a warmly human impulse answered her evident need.
He was young and had not yet been at his work long enough to determine his ultimate nature. Later on, his profession would do to him one of two things. It would transform him into a mere machine, brutalised and calloused, with only one or two emotions aside from selfishness left to thrive in his dwarfed soul, or it would humanise him to godlike unselfishness, attune him to a divine sympathy, and mellow his heart in tenderness beyond words. In one instance he would be feared; in the other, only loved, by those who came to him.
As Barbara went across the room to another chair, his eyes followed her with intense interest. Eloise shrank from him a little—she had never seen him like this before. Yet she knew, from the expression of his face, that he had found hope, and was glad.