smile touched his lips, and his hands swept over the coverlet as though
smoothing out a wrinkled map.

"The blind man gets new senses," he said dreamily. "I feel things where
I used to see them. How did I know it was a fine day? Simple enough.
When the door opened there was only the lightest breath of wind, and the
air was fresh and crisp, and I could smell the sun. One sense less, more
degree of power to the other senses. The sun warms the air, gives it a
flavour, and between it and the light frost, which showed that it was dry
outside, I got the smell of a fine Fall day. Also, I heard the cry of
the wild fowl going South, and they wouldn't have made a sound if it
hadn't been a fine day. And also, and likewise, and besides, and
howsomever, I heard Jim singing, and that nigger never sings in bad
weather. Jim's a fair-weather raven, and this morning he was singing
like a 'lav'rock in the glen.'"

Being blind, he could not see that, suddenly, a storm of emotion swept
over her face.

His cheerfulness, his boylike simplicity, his indomitable spirit, which
had survived so much, and must still face so much, his almost childlike
ways, and the naive description of a blind man's perception, waked in her
an almost intolerable yearning. It was not the yearning of a maid for a
man. It was the uncontrollable woman in her, the mother-thing, belonging
to the first woman that ever was-protection of the weak, hovering love
for the suffering, the ministering spirit.

Since Ingolby had been brought to the house in the pines, Madame Bulteel
and herself, with Jim, had nursed him through the Valley of the Shadow.
They had nursed him through brain-fever, through agonies which could not