“I’ve made up my mind that if the doctor can’t save my sight I’ll do as they did.  It’s like dropping the curtains on the outside darkness when night comes on, godmother says, and turning up the lights and stirring the fire, and making it so bright and cheerful and sweet inside that you forget how dark it is outdoors.

“And maybe if I can do that, and think all the time about the beautiful things I have seen and read, I can make up stories some day as they did their poems and hymns.  I will write fairy tales that the children will love to listen to and ask to hear, over and over again.  I know I can do it, for the ones I’ve made for Davy he likes best of all.  I’d never hope to write stories that grown people would be interested in, and love as they love Tusitala’s, but just to be the children’s ‘tale-teller,’ and to write stories that they would listen to long after I am dead and gone—­why that would be worth living for, even if I never saw the light again.  And godmother thinks I can do it.”

“I know you can,” assented Lloyd, warmly, “and we’ll copy them for you, and send them away to be put into books.”

“Joyce,” asked Betty, “would you mind reading that little newspaper clipping to the girls about the Road of the Loving Heart?  I want them to know about it, too.”

She did not know that they had already heard it, listening outside her door with heavy hearts and troubled faces, and when Joyce had found it and again read it aloud, she told them the story of the memory road that she was trying to leave behind her.

“It will be harder to do now that I am blind,” she said, at the last, “for I can’t help being a care and a trouble to everybody, everywhere I go now.  But godmother says people won’t mind that much if I’ll only be pleasant and cheerful about my misfortune, and not let it cast its shadow on other lives any more than I can help.  I haven’t said anything about it yet to her, but if there is enough money in the bank that papa left to educate me with, I want to go to a school for the blind and learn to read those queer raised letters, and to do everything for myself.  Then I’ll not be such a trouble to everybody.”

“But how can you be cheerful and pleasant, and go on that way for a whole lifetime?” asked Eugenia, with a shiver.  “You may live to be an old, old woman.”

“Oh, Eugenia!” exclaimed Joyce, in a shocked undertone.  “Don’t remind the poor little thing of of that.”

“I know,” answered Betty, her smile all gone now, and her lip trembling.  “Sometimes when I think of that, it’s so awful that I can hardly stand it.  But it will be only a day at a time, and if I can manage to get through them one by one, and keep my courage up to the end, it will be all right afterward, you know, for there is no night there.  The nurse read me that yesterday out of Revelation.  That’s the only thing that comforts me sometimes.”  She repeated it in a soft whisper, turning her face away:  “There’ll be no night there!”