Page:Rowland--The Mountain of Fears.djvu/306

  Personally, for your own good, I would advise you to get overboard, and if you wish I will lead you to the rail. I have been truth fully answering the questions which you asked me concerning your wife. . . .'

"We were both silent for many minutes."

" 'I begin to see it now, I begin to see it . . . you are right. . . .' And then, Doctor, as he looked down the long, dark, narrow corridor stretching away into the years of obscurity before him the shadow fell across his soul and I left him writhing beneath the weight of his doom."

Leyden paused and turned his pale, classic face toward the liquid darkness of the star-flecked sky. ". . . See all of those planets, Doctor," he mused, "and think of what the sight of just one of them would mean to a blind man . . . a single break in the utter obliteration of a sense . . . a pin-prick in the curtain. . . . I once witnessed an operation which restored to a blind man the perception of light alone . . . no vision, only light [ 290 ]