He looked puzzled.
"There's a legend!" she exclaimed. "Auntie and I learned it this very afternoon. The singing of a white blackbird restores sight to the blind!"
"Well," he said, carelessly, rapping the ashes out of his pipe, "what of that?" And he looked up in her face again, thinking that her luminous brown eyes had never been so lovely.
He saw them change and grow piteous, even as he spoke.
"Didn't Auntie tell you?" she demanded.
He shook his head.
She grew white, and a moan escaped her lips. The truth dawned, clear and pitiless. Aunt Jane had failed to tell him plainly, and Elbridge Allan—her lover, as she had believed—was yet in ignorance of her fate.
But the girl had had a long training in courage, and she spoke instantly. "Mr. Allan, I am in all probability going to be absolutely blind. They said that in Paris and London last summer, and they gave me a year. Dr. Sands told me a month ago that I had but one chance in fifty."
Her voice was quiet and even, but she did not trust herself to look at Elbridge Allan. She gazed out over the gloomy lake toward the sun-tipped peak of Morraway Mountain, and waited. She would know, now. So many times had she waited, like this, for a verdict from the doctors, but her heart had never seemed to stop quite still before. She heard him make a surprised movement, but he did not speak.
"I knew Billy Sands in college," he said awkwardly at last. "He was too lazy then to walk across the yard when the bell rang."