...  When I was about fifteen, a boy cousin of mine, several years younger, terribly injured himself on the Fourth of July; and I sat all night in the room with him, helping his mother.  Somehow he had learned that there was no hope of saving his sight; he was an imaginative child and realised the whole meaning of the catastrophe; the eternal darkness....  And he understood that the thing had been done, that there was no going back of it.  This very certainty increased the intensity of his rebellion a thousandfold.  “I will have my eyes!” he screamed.  “I will!  I will!”

Keredec had told his tragic ward too little.  The latter had understood but vaguely the nature of the catastrophe which overhung his return to France, and now that it was indeed concrete and definite, the guardian was forced into fuller disclosures, every word making the anguish of the listener more intolerable.  It was the horizonless despair of a child; and that profound protest I had so often seen smouldering in his eyes culminated, at its crisis, in a wild flame of revolt.  The shame of the revelation passed over him; there was nothing of the disastrous drunkard, sober, learning what he had done.  To him, it seemed that he was being forced to suffer for the sins of another man.

“Do you think that you can make me believe I did this?” he cried.  “That I made life unbearable for her, drove her from me, and took this hideous, painted old woman in her place?  It’s a lie.  You can’t make me believe such a monstrous lie as that!  You can’t!  You can’t!”

He threw himself violently upon the couch, face downward, shuddering from head to foot.

“My poor boy, it is the truth,” said Keredec, kneeling beside him and putting a great arm across his shoulders.  “It is what a thousand men are doing this night.  Nothing is more common, or more unexplainable—­or more simple.  Of all the nations it is the same, wherever life has become artificial and the poor, foolish young men have too much money and nothing to do.  You do not understand it, but our friend here, and I, we understand because we remember what we have been seeing all our life.  You say it is not you who did such crazy, horrible things, and you are right.  When this poor woman who is so painted and greasy first caught you, when you began to give your money and your time and your life to her, when she got you into this horrible marriage with her, you were blind—­you went staggering, in a bad dream; your soul hid away, far down inside you, with its hands over its face.  If it could have once stood straight, if the eyes of your body could have once been clean for it to look through, if you could have once been as you are to-day, or as you were when you were a little child, you would have cry out with horror both of her and of yourself, as you do now; and you would have run away from her and from everything you had put in your