A SUCCESSFUL OPERATION. 365
dear. He might easily have provided for me long before the crash came."
" Never mind, Robert. Are we not all the happier for having waited for each other?" And in the spiritual ec- stasy of her glance he forgot for a while his latest trouble.
Robert's father lived in a little room on a small allowance made him by his outcast son. Broken by age and mis- fortune, he pottered about chess-rooms and debating forums, garrulous and dogmatic, and given to tippling. But now the consciousness of his coming infirmity crushed him, and he sat for days on his bed brooding, waiting in terror for the darkness, and glad when day after day ended only in the shadows of eve. Sometimes, instead of the dreaded dark- ness, sunlight came. That was when Mary dropped in to cheer him up, and to repeat to him that the hospital took a most hopeful view of his case, was only waiting for the dark- ness to be thickest to bring back the dawn. It took four months before the light faded utterly, and then another month before the film was opaque enough to allow the cata- ract to be couched. The old man was to go into the hospital for the operation. Robert hired a lad to be with him during the month of waiting, and sometimes sat with him in the evenings, after business, and now and then the landlady looked in and told him her troubles, and the attendant was faithful and went out frequently to buy him gin. But it was only Mary who could really soothe him now, for the poor old creature's soul groped blindly amid new apprehensions — a nervous dread of the chloroforming, the puncturing, the strange sounds of voices of the great blank hospital, where he felt confusedly he would be lost in an ocean of unfathomable night, incapable even of divining, from past experience, the walls about him or the ceiling over his head, and withal a paralysing foreboding that the operation would
