Page:Held to Answer (1916).pdf/48

 A broad grin overspread the features of the General Freight Agent. "You don't know John," he said. "That boy would die of nervousness the first day out. He's afraid of people. Besides," went on Mitchell, "we couldn't get along without him. He knows too much that nobody else knows."

"Well, anyway, never again the typewriter!" commanded the doctor from the door, getting out quickly and hurrying away with the consciousness of duty extremely well performed. He knew that he had exaggerated the extent of John's eye-trouble; but he believed that it was necessary to exaggerate it, both to Hampstead and to Mr. Mitchell.

In his darkened room at the hospital, John was feeling somehow suddenly honored of destiny. People were thinking, talking, caring about him. There was exaltation just in that. But also he was fuming. He wasn't ill. He was simply confined. He could not read. He could not write. He could do nothing but sit in a darkened room according to prescription, and wait. But on the third day Doctor Gallagher said:

"As soon as it is dusk, you may go out for a swift walk. That's to get exercise. Keep off the main streets; keep away from bright lights, do not try to read signs, to recognize people, or in fact to look at anything closely."

John leaped eagerly at this permission, but there was design in his devotion to the new prescription of which the doctor knew nothing. On the fifth day of his confinement, Tayna and Dick, who had been coming every afternoon to sit for an hour in the semi-darkness with their uncle, surprised the interned one doing odd contortions in the depths of his room: twisting his wrists; standing on one foot like a stork and twirling his great heel and toe from the knee in some eccentric imitation of