"How comes it that this sweet little man and I have never met before?" said Sunlocks.
"You might live ten years in an Iceland house and never see the children of its servants," said the priest.
"I've heard his silvery voice, though," said Sunlocks. "What is the color of his eyes?"
"Blue," said the priest.
"Then his hair—this long curly hair—it must be of the color of the sun?" said Sunlocks.
"Flaxen," said the priest.
"Run along to your mother, sweetheart, run," said Sunlocks, and, dropping back in his seat, he murmured, "How easily he might have been my son indeed."
Kneeling on both knees, her hot face turned down and her parted lips quivering, Greeba had listened to all this with the old delicious trembling at both sides her heart. And going back to her own room, she caught sight of herself in the glass, and saw that her eyes were dancing like diamonds and all her cheeks a rosy red. Life, and a gleam of sunshine, seemed to have shot into her face in an instant, and while she looked there came over her a creeping thrill of delight, for she knew that she was beautiful. And because he loved beauty whose love was everything to her, she cried for joy, and picked up her boy, where he stood tugging at her gown, and kissed him rapturously.
The little man, with proper manly indifference to such endearments, wriggled back to the ground, and then Greeba remembered, with a flash that fell on her brain like a sword, that her husband was blind now, and all the beauty of the world was nothing to him. Smitten by this thought, she stood a moment, while the sunshine died out of her eyes and the rosy red out of her cheeks. But presently it came to her to ask herself if Sunlocks was blind forever, and if nothing could be done for him. This brought back, with pangs of remorse for such long forgetfulness, the memory of some man, an apothecary in Husavik, who had the credit of curing many of blindness after accidents in the northern mines where free men worked for wage. So, thinking of this apothecary throughout that day and the next, she found at last a crooked way to send money to him, out of the store that still remained to her, and to ask him to come to Grimsey.
But, waiting for the coming of the apothecary, a new dread, that was also a new hope, stole over her.