"But how did you know," she asked, "that I was up the tree?"
"Quite simple," he said. "I heard you."
"And how could you tell that that was a rotten branch?"
"Because I heard the sound of it when your toes touched it."
Marian was silent for a moment.
"You must have awfully good hearing," she said. "But I suppose you've practised rather a lot."
"Well, a good deal," he admitted. "You see, I was in the middle of Asia when I first lost my sight. I was camping out, and painting pictures, and shooting an occasional buck for my breakfast and dinner. Then a gun went off while somebody was cleaning it, and the next moment I was blind; and for a couple of months there was only one thing I wanted, and that was to die as soon as I could."
He poured out some tea for her and dropped a lump of sugar into it.
"And then one day," he said, "there came a man to see me, and he told me that I oughtn't to be discouraged. He was an old priest of some queer sort of religion that the people of those parts believed in; and he was sorry for me, and took me to stay with him in a little temple up in the mountains. I never knew his name, we were just father and son to each other, and I suppose that most people would have called him a heathen. But he had lived all his life up among the mountains, studying nature and praying to God. Well, I stayed with him for more than a year, and he used to talk to me about the things he knew. I was a bad pupil, I'm afraid, but he was infinitely patient; and after a time I began to learn a little. 'You are blind, my son,' he used to tell me, 'but only a little less blind than other people. And you have ears that are still almost deaf. Why not stay with me and learn to hear?' I told him that I could hear, but he only smiled—it's a lovely thing to hear people smile—and then he began to teach me, just as he would have taught a child, the ABC of hearing."
He finished his cake and filled his pipe.