"How should I know?" retorted Karl, heatedly, almost angrily. "What do I know about it? If an oculist can't tell—you say he is a good one—why should you expect me to?" And then he added with a touch of eagerness, as if seizing upon a possibility: "I don't believe that fellow amounts to much. I think I'll go out now and hunt up somebody who knows something."
"The man's all right," said Dr. Parkman shortly. His own foot was tapping the floor nervously. "You ought to have some idea," he added, with what he felt to be brutal insistence, "as to whether or not you got anything in your eyes."
"Well, I haven't! I don't know anything about it."
But he was breathing hard. His whole manner told of fears and possibilities he was not willing to state. He would tell what he thought now in just a minute; the doctor knew that.
He began with insisting, elaborately, that he never got things on his hands—that was not his way; and even if he did get something on his hands, he wouldn't get it in his eyes; even if he did rub his eyes sometimes—he didn't admit it—but even if he did, would he be such a fool as to rub them when he had something on his hands? But if, in spite of all those impossibilities, just admitting for the sake of argument, and because Parkman insisted on being ominous, that it was something like that, there were two things it might be. It might be—he named the first with emphasis, and Dr. Parkman, after a minute's thought, heaved a big sigh of unmistakable relief.
"Now you see that couldn't make any vital difference," Karl added, with a debonair manner, a thin veneer of aggressiveness.
The doctor was leaning forward in his chair. He was beginning to grow fearful of the emphasis put upon this thing which could make no vital difference.
Karl stopped as though he had reached the end of his story. But the silence was wearing on him. His eyes had a hunted look.
"Why, you can see for yourself," he said—and this was the note of appeal—"that that could not make any vital difference."
Dr. Parkman was looking at him narrowly. His own breath was coming hard.
He saw at last that he would have to ask.