"My poor child, you will need all your courage, all your devotion. The sight is lost—at least, we fear so."
Jeanne, who had been so brave since the first day; who had excited the admiration of the doctors, whom she had done her best, so gallantly, to second in their endeavours, felt all her fine courage desert her in an instant. She rose upright, and scanned the doctor's face for one second to see whether this sentence was without appeal, then fell her full length, unconscious, on the floor.
"Fell unconscious on the floor."
From this time forth she seemed to undergo a slow revolution. She measured her strength, and thought of the task which was set before her, and trembled to find it insufficient. It would have taken a closer observer than were those friends who approached her most nearly, to discover the slightest change in that petite Madame du Boys, whose praises were in everybody's mouth. Her devotion was unlimited. The doctors were not sufficiently courageous to tell the sorrowful truth, themselves, to their patient; and the day on which the bandages were finally removed from the poor scarred face, and Karl first realised that he was blind, it was she who bore the brunt of that first terrible explosion of despair, the despair of a man struck down in full career, a man who finds himself dead to all intents and purposes, whilst in the very midst of life.
The dangerous period once past, and the long course of the malady established in all its dull monotony, the visits of the doctor became fewer and farther apart, and Jeanne was left very solitary with her sick husband. Life came slowly back to him; he experienced that languor which is the outcome of extreme weakness; that absorbing somnolence incident to beginning existence all over again. Oftenest an oppressive silence reigned in the darkened room. Jeanne, with idle hands in her lap, and wide-opened eyes seeing nothing they seemed to be looking at, but sending their gaze far, very far into that future which frightened her, would remain for hours without once moving. She repeated to herself, without altogether being able to realise it—"Blind! and then, what?" And this "what?" showed her such dreadful possibilities, that she shivered with terror. What tormented her was not alone the thought of that frightful night into which a man of thirty-six, full of vigour, who had not yet even arrived at the full fruition of his mental strength, had been suddenly plunged; that startling arrest of activity which had become already proverbial with his colleagues. No doubt, she felt great pity for her husband; but there was mingled with it a sort of angry irritation. If he had listened to her, only for once, if he had but indulged her feminine caprice, all this would never have happened; but this man, who was so amiable in many ways,
