It's
the living death, Binkie. We're to be shut up in the dark in one year if we're
careful, and we shan't see anybody, and we shall never have anything we want,
not though we live to be a hundred!" Binkie wagged his tail joyously. "Binkie,
we must think. Let's see how it feels to be blind." Dick shut his eyes, and
flaming commas and Catherine-wheels floated inside the lids. Yet when he looked
across the Park the scope of his vision was not contracted. He could see
perfectly, until a procession of slow-wheeling fireworks defiled across his
eyeballs.
"Little dorglums, we aren't at all well. Let's go home. If only Torp were back,
now!"
But Torpenhow was in the south of England, inspecting dockyards in the company
of the Nilghai. His letters were brief and full of mystery.
Dick had never asked anybody to help him in his joys or his sorrows. He argued,
in the loneliness of his studio, henceforward to be decorated with a film of
gray gauze in one corner, that, if his fate were blindness, all the Torpenhows
in the world could not save him. "I can't call him off his trip to sit down and
sympathise with me. I must pull through this business alone," he said. He was
lying on the sofa, eating his moustache and wondering what the darkness of the
night would be like.
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