Like all other people, knowing no more of the subject than I knew, I had no idea of the pitiably helpless manner in which the restored sense of sight struggles to assert itself, in persons who have been blind for life. In such cases, the effort of the eyes that are first learning to see, is like the effort of the limbs when a child is first learning to walk. But for Grosse's odd way of taking it, the scene which I was now to witness would have been painful in the last degree. My poor Lucilla—instead of filling me with joy, as I had anticipated—would I really believe have wrung my heart, and have made me burst out crying.
"Now!" said Grosse, laying one hand on Lucilla's arm, while he pointed to me with the other. "There she stands. Can you go to her?"
"Of course I can!"
"I lay you a bet-wager you can not! Ten thausand pounds to six pennies. Done-done. Now try!"
She answered by a little gesture of defiance, and took three hasty steps forward. Bewildered and frightened, she stopped suddenly at the third step—before she had advanced half the way from her end of the room to mine.
"I saw her here," she said, pointing down to the spot on which she was standing; and appealing piteously to Grosse. "I see her now—and I don't know where she is! She is so near, I feel as if she touched my eyes—and yet" (she advanced another step, and clutched with her hands at the empty air)—"and yet, I can't get near enough to take hold of her. Oh! what does it mean? what does it mean?"
"It means—pay me my six pennies!" said Grosse. "The wager-bet is mine!"
She resented his laughing at her, with an obstinate shake of her head, and an angry knitting of her pretty eyebrows.
"Wait a little," she said. "You shan't win quite so easily as that. I will get to her yet!"
She came straight to me in a moment—just as easily as I could have gone to her myself if I had tried.