"You astonish me, Lucilla!"
She rattled her teaspoon impatiently in her empty cup.
"Can you always trust your eyes, even in broad daylight?" she burst out. "How often do they deceive you, in the simplest things? What did I hear you all disputing about the other day in the garden? You were looking at some view?"
"Yes—at the view down the alley of trees at the other end of the churchyard wall."
"Some object in the alley had attracted general notice—had it not?"
"Yes—an object at the further end of it."
"I heard you up here. You all differed in opinion, in spite of your wonderful eyes. My father said it moved. You said it stood still. Oscar said it was a man. Mrs. Finch said it was a calf. Nugent ran off, and examined this amazing object at close quarters. And what did it turn out to be? A stump of an old tree blown across the road in the night! Why am I to envy people the possession of a sense which plays them such tricks as that? No! no! Herr Grosse is going to 'cut into my cataracts,' as he calls it—because I am going to be married to a man I love; and I fancy, like a fool, I may love him better still, if I can see him. I may be quite wrong," she added archly. "It may end in my not loving him half as well as I do now!"
I thought of Oscar's face, and felt a sickening fear that she might be speaking far more seriously than she suspected. I tried to change the subject. No! Her imaginative nature had found its way into a new region of speculation before I could open my lips.
"I associate light," she said thoughtfully, "with all that is beautiful and heavenly—and dark with all that is vile and horrible and devilish. I wonder how light and dark will look to me when I see?"
"I believe they will astonish you," I answered, "by being entirely unlike what you fancy them to be now."