"The usual speech," laughed Karl.
"But in this case it seems so confoundedly true."
"Well I believe it will help some, and I'll be glad of that," he added simply. "Oh I have some more schemes. If I've got to be blind I'm going to make blindness a better business."
"Our old friend the devil didn't do so well then after all," said Dr. Parkman quietly. "He closed up one channel, but he didn't figure on your burrowing another."
Karl laughed. "Oh this won't worry him much; it came so easily I can't think it amounts to a great deal. But as long as I was used to scheming things out it—amused me, exercised a few cells that were in pretty bad need of a job. And I have other ideas," he repeated.
Parkman asked what Karl intended to do with his model, offering some suggestions. The doctor was more than interested and pleased; he was deeply stirred. "Why, confound the fellow," he was saying to himself,—"they can't knock him out! They knock him down in one place, and he bobs up in another!" The ideas of this brain were as difficult to suppress as certain other things in nature. Dam up one place—they find another.
They smoked their cigars and talked intermittently then; they were close enough together to be silent when they chose. And all the while the undercurrent of Dr. Parkman's thought flowed steadily on.
He was thinking that after all there were better things to do with fate than damn it. If ever a man would seem justified in spending his soul in the damning of fate, that man, it seemed to him, was the friend beside him. And while he had done some of it, perhaps a great deal more than any one knew, it had not been his master-passion. His master-passion had been to press on—press on to be knew not what—there was the glory of it! It was easy enough to work toward a goal sighted ahead; but it took a Karl Hubers to work on through the darkness.
And ah, there was a good time coming! The doctor's sombre face relaxed to a smile. His own life seemed almost worth living now just because he had been able to take a hand—yes, and play a few good cards—in this little game. Those things Karl had shown him today made it seem there was all the finer joy in bringing him back to the things which were his own. He had been thrust from out the gates, but he had not sat whimpering outside the wall. He had gone on and sought to find a place in that outer world in which he found himself. And now he should come back to his own through gates of glory.
Karl asked him about Ernestine then. How was she looking; was she thin—pale? Her face felt pale to him, he said. He had urged her to work, because he knew she would be happier so, but Parkman must see to it she did not overwork. Had he seen the picture on which she was working so hard? He asked that wistfully; and the doctor's face was soft, and a gentleness crept into his voice as he said he believed he was to see the great picture very soon now. And then, after a silence, Karl said, softly, very tenderly—"Bless her gamey little heart!"