Marmion Moore halted upon the stairs and felt mechanically for her gold chatelaine.  She recalled dropping it upon the center-table as she went forward with hands outstretched to Austin; so she turned back, then hesitated.  But he was leaving to-morrow; surely he would not misinterpret the meaning of her reappearance.  Summoning her self-control, she remounted the stairs quickly.

The door was half ajar as she had left it in her confusion.  Mustering a careless smile, she was about to knock, then paused.  Austin was facing her in the middle of the room, beating time.  He was counting aloud—­but was that his voice?  In the brief instant she had been gone he had changed astoundingly.  Moreover, notwithstanding the fact that she stood plainly revealed, he made no sign of recognition, but merely counted on and on, with the voice of a dying man.  She divined that something was sadly amiss; she wondered for an instant if the man had lost his senses.

She stood transfixed, half-minded to flee, yet held by some pitying desire to help; then she saw him reach forward and grope his way uncertainly to the window.  In his progress he stumbled against a chair; he had to feel for the casing.  Then she knew.

Marmion Moore found herself inside the room, staring with wide, affrighted eyes at the man whose life she had spoiled.  She pressed her hands to her bosom to still its heavings.  She saw Austin nodding down at the street below; she saw his ghastly attempt to smile; she heard the breath sighing from his lungs and heard him muttering her name.  Then he turned and lurched past her, groping, groping for his chair.  She cried out, sharply, in a stricken voice: 

“Mr. Austin!”

The man froze in his tracks; he swung his head slowly from side to side, as if listening.

“What!” The word came like the crack of a gun.  Then, after a moment, “Marmion!” He spoke her name as if to test his own hearing.  It was the first time she had ever heard him use it.

She slipped forward until within an arm’s-length of him, then stretched forth a wildly shaking hand and passed it before his unwinking eyes, as if she still disbelieved.  Then he heard her moan.

“Marmion!” he cried again.  “My God! little girl, I—­thought I heard you go!”

“Then this, this is the reason,” she said.  “Oh-h-h!”

“What are you doing here?  Why did you come back?” he demanded, brutally.

“I forgot my—­No!  God sent me back!”

There was a pause, during which the man strove to master himself; then he asked, in the same harsh accents: 

“How long have you been here?”

“Long enough to see—­and to understand.”

“Well, you know the truth at last.  I—­have gone—­blind.”  The last word caused his lips to twitch.  He knew from the sound that she was weeping bitterly.  “Please don’t.  I’ve used my eyes too much, that is all.  It is—­nothing.”