At the first signs of spring, and long before the snow was off the
ground, Keith took to the woods. When his father did not care to go,
he went alone. It was as if he wanted to fill his inner consciousness
with the sights and sounds of his beloved out-of-doors, so that when
his outer eyes were darkened, his inner eyes might still hold the
pictures. Keith did not say this, even to himself; but when every day
Susan questioned him minutely as to what he had seen, and begged him
to describe every budding tree and every sunset, he wondered; was it
possible that Susan, too, was trying to fill that inner consciousness
with visions?

Keith was thrown a good deal with Susan these days. Sometimes it
seemed as if there were almost no one but Susan. Certainly all those
others who talked and questioned--he did not want to be with them. And
his father--sometimes it seemed to Keith that his father did not like
to be with him as well as he used to. And, of course, if he was going
to be blind--Dad never had liked disagreeable subjects. Had HE become
--a disagreeable subject?

And so there seemed, indeed, at times, no one but Susan. Susan,
however, was a host in herself. Susan was never cross now, and almost
always she had a cooky or a jam tart for him. She told lots of funny
stories, and there were always her rhymes and jingles. She had a new
one every day, sometimes two or three a day.

There was no subject too big or too little for Susan to put into
rhyme. Susan said that something inside of her was a gushing siphon of
poems, anyway, and she just had to get them out of her system. And she
told Keith that spring always made the siphon gush worse than ever,