And her husband, who had been blinded in Flanders, and who had a
disfiguring mark on his brow, would be coming in from the outhouses.

He had been home for a year now. He was totally blind. Yet they had been
very happy. The Grange was Maurice's own place. The back was a farmstead,
and the Wernhams, who occupied the rear premises, acted as farmers.
Isabel lived with her husband in the handsome rooms in front. She and he
had been almost entirely alone together since he was wounded. They talked
and sang and read together in a wonderful and unspeakable intimacy. Then
she reviewed books for a Scottish newspaper, carrying on her old
interest, and he occupied himself a good deal with the farm. Sightless,
he could still discuss everything with Wernham, and he could also do a
good deal of work about the place--menial work, it is true, but it gave
him satisfaction. He milked the cows, carried in the pails, turned the
separator, attended to the pigs and horses. Life was still very full and
strangely serene for the blind man, peaceful with the almost
incomprehensible peace of immediate contact in darkness. With his wife he
had a whole world, rich and real and invisible.

They were newly and remotely happy. He did not even regret the loss of
his sight in these times of dark, palpable joy. A certain exultance
swelled his soul.

But as time wore on, sometimes the rich glamour would leave them.
Sometimes, after months of this intensity, a sense of burden overcame
Isabel, a weariness, a terrible _ennui_, in that silent house approached
between a colonnade of tall-shafted pines. Then she felt she would go
mad, for she could not bear it. And sometimes he had devastating fits of
depression, which seemed to lay waste his whole being. It was worse than
depression--a black misery, when his own life was a torture to him, and