The days were growing very dark for George Graham. He had not known at first what it meant that black specks should so dance between him and the page he tried to read, that his eyes should ache so much, that all things should seem so strangely dim about him. It would have been better, no doubt, had he stopped work as soon as he felt these symptoms; but how could he? This was his last term at school, and if he passed his examination creditably, especially if he thoroughly mastered the bookkeeping he was trying so hard to conquer, he was to have a place in Deacon Solomon Grant’s store, with wages that would not only take care of himself, but greatly help his mother.

His mother was a widow, and George’s love for her was a sort of passion of devotion. When he could scarcely talk, the first two words he put together were, “Pretty mamma,” and ever since then she had been the first and fairest of created beings to him. He was very fond of Susie Hale, but Susie was only a nice girl,—a dear, sweet, good girl, such as any fellow would like; but his mother was the elect lady to whom were due his love, his care, his uttermost duty.

Mrs. Graham was the kind of woman for a son to be romantic about. She was only seventeen when George was born; and now, when he was sixteen and she was thirty-three, she was, so he thought, more beautiful than ever. She had been a pretty, rather helpless little creature all her life,—one of those women toward whom every man feels the instinct of protection. George’s father had felt it always, and had never allowed care to come near his dainty darling. His one great agony, as he lay dying, was that he must leave her almost unprovided for. That was when George was thirteen, and the boy would never forget how his father had called him to his bedside, and charged him to take care of his mother.

“You are old enough to be her staff, even now,” the dying man had said, clinging to his boy’s hand. “You can be good to her in a thousand ways, save her a thousand cares, and in a few years more you can work for her, and keep her comfortably, as I have done.”

George never forgot this trust for one moment. The plans he made in life were all for his mother’s sake—his future was to be spent in her service. He wanted to come out of school at the time of his father’s death, and try by all manner of little industries to help take care of the household, but his mother was too wise to permit this. She developed a strength of mind and of body for which no one who saw her pink-and-white prettiness,—the prettiness of a girl still, despite all her years of married life,—would have given her credit.

She saw clearly that if her boy’s education stopped at thirteen, he would be held in check all his life by his own ignorance—he must be drudge always, and never master. So she made him go to school three years longer.

How she lived and kept up her refined little home puzzled all lookers-on, and indeed she hardly knew herself. She lived simply; she was busy from morning till night. She sewed for one neighbor, she helped another through some season of sickness, she taught a naughty child who had worn out its welcome at school, but who could not wear out Mrs. Graham’s sweet patience,—and all these things helped. It is true, it was very often hard work to compass the simple necessaries of life, but she struggled on bravely.

When George was sixteen he should come out of school, well trained, she hoped, for a business man, and then things would be so much easier. With this hope in view, she never repined. She kept her strength of soul and her sweetness of temper, her fresh beauty and her fresh heart. She kept, too, her boy’s adoration,—an adoration which was, as I said, the romance of his life.

When the days began to grow so dark for George Graham, it was of his mother that he thought. So far he had no ambitions, no hopes, that were not centred in her. What if this growing shadow about him was to increase until all was dark, until dense night shut him in,—a night through whose blackness no star of hope could shine? What if he must be no help to his mother, but only a burden on her for ever, a burden lasting through heaven only knew how many helpless years?

He rebelled against such a fate madly. He stretched out his hands toward heaven, he lifted the dumb prayer of his darkening eyes, but no help came.

Dimmer and dimmer grew the world about him, more and more desperate the gloom of his hopeless heart. His scholarship had been so fine that his teacher hesitated to reprove his now continual failures; and George said nothing of the increasing darkness around him,—nothing to his mother, for he felt that it would break her heart; nothing to teacher or school-mates, for it seemed to him his grief would be nothing to them. But one afternoon the crisis came.

His recitation had been an utter failure, and, at last, his teacher spoke in severe terms of the neglect which had become habitual. No one who was present that day—not even the smallest child—will ever forget the look of despair that swept over George Graham’s face, or the gesture of helpless anguish with which he stretched out his hands, as if to seek among them all some friend, as he cried,—

“God help me, sir! I have been going blind; and now I cannot see one figure in my book—I can hardly see your face.”

There was a silence after this, through which came no sound but the audible beating of George Graham’s tortured heart. Then the master sent away the others, for school hours were nearly over, and tried his best to comfort his stricken pupil. It might not be so bad as he feared, an oculist might help him, perhaps it was only temporary.

To all these well-meant consolations George listened in a sort of dreary silence. The words of the teacher entered his ears, but they did not reach his heart or kindle his hope.

As soon as he could, he went away. He did not go straight home. How could he face his mother and tell her what he must tell her now,—what she would be sure to hear from others, if not from him? He kept thinking how she would take it. Would not all the light go out of her face? Maybe she would faint away, as he remembered she had done when his father died.

He sat down on a bank, a little removed from the road-side, a bank which overhung a swift and deep, yet narrow stream.

An awful temptation came over him,—such a temptation as, thank Heaven! comes to few boys of sixteen, with the young, glad life running riot in their veins. He thought, what if he should die, then and there? It seemed to him the one desirable thing. To be sure, to die would be to leave his mother to fight her battle of life alone; but also it would relieve her from the heavy burden he must needs be to her if he lived. The river rushing down there below invited him with its murmur. Should he seek refuge there, and let his mother hear that he was dead, before she heard that he was blind? He bent forward over the stream. Then he drew back, for a longing came over him to go home first, and see his mother just once more; and then an exceeding bitter cry burst from his lips,—

“See her! What am I talking about? Do I not know I shall never see her again?”

And a girl’s voice, soft and cooing and tender,—an utterly unexpected voice,—answered him,—

“Yes, you will see her again. Surely you will see her again.”

The boy turned his face toward the sound.

“How did you come here, Susie Hale?” he asked.

“Don’t be angry, George,” the gentle voice entreated. “I waited for you. I could not go home till I had told you how sorry I was, and tried to comfort you.”

“Comfort me!” There was a sort of scornful bitterness in the cry. “How can I be comforted? Do you think what it will be never to see the green earth or the blue sky, or any dear face any more, for ever and ever?”

“But you will see them,” she said gently. “I did not mean that you must be reconciled to give up hope. I mean that you must take heart, and try to be cured. I have known people who could not see at all to be helped, and why not you? At least, you must try.”

An evil mood was upon George Graham, and he answered harshly,—

“Where is the money to come from, if you please? It has been all mother could do just to live and she has struggled on, in the expectation of my being able soon to help her. She has no money for experiments. There is nothing for it but for me to rest a dead weight upon her hands, or—die.”

He said the last word with a sort of gasp. Susie Hale shivered. She drew closer to him. She looked into his poor, tortured face, with her dark and tender eyes, and said very quietly,—

“You believe in God, George Graham, and you will not defy Him. If He means you to bear this you will bear it like a man, and not try to get rid of the burden. But I do not believe He does mean you to bear it; and I will not believe it till every means has been tried for your cure. Just now, it seems to me, you ought to go home. Would you like your mother to hear this first from some one else?”

He rose slowly.

“You are right,” he said, “and you are a good girl. Good-by, Susie.”

She did not try to go with him; she followed him only with her eyes. She was contented if she could but send him home in safety to his mother.

His mother met him at the gate. When she took his hand in hers the poor fellow felt that she knew all. She was very quiet and self-controlled.

“Your teacher has been here,” she said, “and he has told me. My darling, why have you sat in the darkness, and shut your mother out from any share in your trouble?”

“Oh, I couldn’t tell you, mother!” he sobbed, with his head upon her breast, at last,—“I couldn’t, I thought it would break your heart.”

“Ah! that was because you did not know. If you should die and leave me alone in the world, that, indeed, would break my heart; but while I have you beside me, nothing can make me altogether miserable, and nothing must make you so. There is help somewhere, and we will find it, please God; or, if not, we will bear what others have borne, and find a way to lighten the darkness.”

Meantime, Susie Hale had gone home full of an absorbing purpose. Somehow money must and should be raised to try what a skilful oculist could do for George Graham.

Susie was the orphan niece of Deacon Solomon Grant, in whose store a place was awaiting George. She knew that she had a modest little fortune of her own, but it was all in her uncle’s hands, and without his consent she could not dispose even of her slender income. But would he not be persuaded to let her have enough of her own money to accomplish her desire? She asked him, using her utmost power of persuasion to touch his heart, but he refused with peremptory decision. He wouldn’t mind contributing moderately to a fund for young Graham’s help—he would not even mind letting her have five or ten dollars of her own for that purpose—but beyond that the duty of one neighbor did not go. And Deacon Solomon shut his lips together as tightly as he buttoned up his pocket.

Susie had in the world one treasure,—a diamond ring which had been her mother’s, with a stone white and clear as a dew-drop. This must, she knew, be worth three or four hundred dollars. It was her very own. She had meant to keep it all her life for her mother’s sake, but surely this great need of George Graham’s justified her in parting with it.

She had one friend in Boston,—an old teacher,—in whose good faith and judicious management she felt implicit confidence, and to him she sent her mother’s ring, with a request that he would sell it as speedily and on as good terms as possible, and remit her the price of it in bank-notes, not in a check, and keep for ever the secret that she had disposed of it.

It was a week after George Graham had given up hope, when a most unexpected hope came to him. A neighbor, going by from the post-office, handed in at the door a letter addressed to him. Mrs. Graham opened it, for George’s vision had failed with every day, and his eyes were utterly useless now.

“George,” she cried, after a moment, in an eager, trembling voice, “here are three one-hundred dollar bills, and this is the letter that comes with them:—

“‘This money is from a true friend of George Graham’s, and is to be applied to taking him to an oculist, in the hope that his sight may be restored. The giver withholds his name, both because he desires no thanks, and because he wishes to make the return of the money impossible.’

“It is from Heaven, itself!” the mother cried. “George, we will start for Boston to-morrow. I feel in my soul that you are to be cured.”

The next day a mother and her blind son sought rooms at a quiet boarding-house, of which they had found the number in the advertisement column of a city paper, and the day after that they were among the earliest patients of Doctor Annesley. The first examination of George’s eyes was unpromising enough. They would be worse before they were better; an operation might or might not restore sight to them, but the time for it had not yet come. Meanwhile the doctor wanted to see him daily.

Those were weary days and weeks that followed, both before the operation and afterward, when the poor eyes were carefully bandaged from the light, and mother and son sat day after day in the dark together, wondering, wondering, wondering what the result would be. It was curious that the mother was always hopeful, and the son always despairing. At last it almost irritated him to hear her speak of hope to him; and one day he turned on her with the first burst of passionate impatience she had ever experienced from him.

“Mother,” he said, “for the love of Heaven do not talk to me as if it was a sure thing that I am going to see again. I want to think it doubtful, almost impossible. If you should make me expect a sure cure, and then it shouldn’t come, don’t you see that I should go mad? I think I should dash my head against the wall. I can only live by expecting nothing.”

After that the mother held her peace; but whenever she went out of that darkened room those who saw her marvelled at the light of joy in her eyes, the bloom of hope upon her cheeks. At last the time came—the bandage was removed. There was just one wild cry, “Mother, I see you!” and then George Graham lay at the doctor’s feet, swooning and helpless in his great joy.

It was weeks yet before he went home again, but the good news preceded him. The mother wrote it to Deacon Grant, who had agreed still to keep the place in his store open, while awaiting the result of this experiment.

The deacon read the letter in full family conclave, with the slow deliberation of a man unused to correspondence. He little knew how his niece longed to snatch the paper from his hand and read it for herself; nor did he heed the tears that swam in her dark eyes.

Deliberately he smoothed out the letter, and folded it. Deliberately he took off his spectacles, and wiped them, and put them on again. Then he said, with the half pompous, half solemn manner which became his position,—

“Well, well, I’m ready always to rejoice with those that rejoice; and I’m sure I’m thankful that the Widow Graham hasn’t got to struggle with so much trouble as it looked as if Providence was laying on her; but wherever she got that money the Lord knows.”

Another letter came, afterward, to tell when the widow and her son were to return, and to ask Deacon Grant, in whose keeping the key of their house had been left, to put it in their door on that day as he was passing by to the store.

It was Susie who walked over with the key, early in the afternoon, carrying with her a basket of dainties for the travellers’ supper, from Mrs. Grant, a woman who knew how to be a good neighbor, and to make life pleasant with cheap kindnesses. Susie’s black eyes danced, and her heart sang within her as she set the table in the little parlor and lighted a fire in the kitchen stove, ready to make a fresh cup of tea whenever the widow and her son should arrive. Then she dusted every thing; and then she gathered some of the flowers of September,—for already the summer was over,—and put them in the vases on the mantel, and on the widow’s little round sewing-table.

And at last the travellers came, as at last every thing does come, if we wait long enough for it. They had expected to find an empty house; they found instead, warmth and brightness and good cheer and Susie Hale.