“But for good? Do you mean—quite blind?”
“Ah, I don’t know!” she cried, unable to control her voice. “I don’t know. Dr. Farmer does not know, the physician who came from Birmingham to see him does not know. They say that they have hopes—and I don’t know! But I fear.”
He was silent then, touched with pity, feeling at length the pathos of it, feeling it almost as she felt it. But after a pause, during which she stood watching his face, “And if he does not recover his sight?”
“God forbid!”
“I say God forbid too, with all my heart. Still, if he does not—what then? When may I——”
“When the time comes,” she answered, “and of that I must be the judge. Yes, Clement,” with resolution. “I must be the judge, for I alone know how he is, and I alone can choose the occasion.”
The delay was very bitter to him. He had ridden out determined to put his fate to the test, to let nothing stand between him and his love, to over-ride excuses; and he could not in a moment make up his mind to be thwarted.
“And I must wait? I must go on waiting? Eating my heart out—doing nothing?”
“There is no other way. Indeed, indeed there is not.”
“But it is too much. It is too much, Jos, that you ask!”