“Do you feel so very sorry about the lighter, Larry?” she asked anxiously; “will it take such a great lot of money to mend it?”
Larry did not raise his head, but it seemed to Courage that a sob, as real as any child's, shook his strong frame.
“Please, Larry, speak to me,” Courage pleaded, and feeling her two hands against his face, Larry suffered her to lift it up. Yes, there were tears in his eyes. Courage saw them and looked right away—even to the child there was something sacred in a strong man's tears—but she slipped on to his knee, nestled her head on his shoulder, and then said, in the tenderest little voice, “It isn't just the accident, is it, Larry? Something's been troubling you this long while. Please tell me what it is. Don't forget about my name being Courage, and that p'r'aps I can help you.”
The words fell very sweetly upon Larry's ear, and he drew her closer to him, but she could feel him slowly move his head from side to side, as though it were hopeless to look for help from any quarter. Suddenly a dreadful possibility flashed itself across her mind, and sitting upright, she said excitedly, “You're not going to die, Larry? Say it isn't that, quick, Larry!”
“No, darling, it isn't that,” Larry hastened to answer, deeply touched by the agony in her voice, “but it's almost worse than dying; I'm going—” and then the word failed him, and he passed his hand significantly across his eyes.
“Not blind, Larry?” yet instantly recalling, as she spoke, many a little incident that confirmed her fears.
“Yes, blind, Courage; that's the way it happened to-night. It was all my fault. I couldn't rightly see.”
“But, Larry, hardly any one could see, it was getting so dark.”
“Courage, darling,” Larry said tenderly, “it's been getting dark for me for a year. I shall never sail a boat again. They told me in the spring that I wasn't fit for it, but then I found you'd set your heart on being on the water with me, and so, with Dick's eyes to help, I thought I could manage just for the summer; but it's all over now, and it's plain enough that I've got to give in.”
And so Larry has done all this for her. At first Courage cannot speak, but at last she contrives to say, in a tearful, trembling voice, “Try not to mind, Larry. If you'll only let me take care of you, it won't matter at all whether we live on the water or not. I can be happy any-where with you.”