Rudyard Kipling I55 bling under him and there was cold fear at the pit of his stomach. “How could it have come without any warning? It’s as sudden as being shot. 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 Catherinewheels 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. “T can’t call him off his trip to sit down and sympathize 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. Then came to his mind the memory of a quaint scene in the Sudan. A soldier had been nearly hacked in two by a broad-bladed Arab spear. For one instant the man felt no pain. Looking down, he saw that his life-blood was going from him. The stupid bewilderment on his face was so intensely comic that both Dick and Torpenhow, still panting and unstrung from a fight for life, had roared with laughter, in which the