Hollister resumed his post against the rail.  His movement had brought him nearer, so that he stood now within arm’s length, and his interest in her had awakened, become suddenly intense.  He felt a queer thankfulness, a warm inward gratefulness, that she had been able to regard his disfigurement unmoved.  He wondered how she could.  For months he had encountered women’s averted faces, the reluctant glances of mingled pity and distaste which he had schooled himself to expect and endure but which he never ceased to resent.  This girl’s uncommon self-possession at close contact with him was a puzzle as well as a pleasure.  A little thing, to be sure, but it warmed Hollister.  It was like an unexpected gleam of sunshine out of a sky banked deep with clouds.

Presently, to his surprise, the girl spoke to him.

“Are we getting near the Channel Islands?”

She was looking directly at him, and Hollister was struck afresh with the curious quality of her gaze, the strangely unperturbed directness of her eyes upon him.  He made haste to answer her question.

“We’ll pass between them in another mile.  You can see the western island a little off our starboard bow.”

“I should be very glad if I could; but I shall have to take your word for its being there.”

“I’m afraid I don’t quite understand.”

A smile spread over her face at the puzzled tone.

“I’m blind,” she explained, with what struck Hollister as infinite patience.  “If my eyes were not sightless, I shouldn’t have to ask a stranger about the Channel Islands.  I used to be able to see them well enough.”

Hollister stared at her.  He could not associate those wide gray eyes with total darkness.  He could scarcely make himself comprehend a world devoid of light and color, an existence in which one felt and breathed and had being amid eternal darkness.  Yet for the moment he was selfish enough to feel glad.  And he said so, with uncharacteristic impulsiveness.

“I’m glad you can’t see,” he found himself saying.  “If you could——­”

“What a queer thing to say,” the girl interrupted.  “I thought every one always regarded a blind person as an object of pity.”

There was an unmistakably sardonic inflection in the last sentence.

“But you don’t find it so, eh?” Hollister questioned eagerly.  He was sure he had interpreted that inflection.  “And you sometimes resent that attitude, eh?”

“I daresay I do,” the girl replied, after a moment’s consideration.  “To be unable to see is a handicap.  At the same time to have pity drooled all over one is sometimes irritating.  But why did you just say you were glad I was blind?”

“I didn’t mean that.  I meant that I was glad you couldn’t see me,” he explained.  “One of Fritz’s shells tore my face to pieces.  People don’t like to look at the result.  Women particularly.  You can’t see my wrecked face, so you don’t shudder and pass on.  I suppose that is why I said that the way I did.”