No merciful, mitigating force caused his
mind to totter. With fairly cosmic regularity, cosmic inevitability,
comprehension struck blow after blow.
He was going blind. He had spent his life studying the action of such
forces as this. _He knew them!_ A man who knew less would have hoped
more. Some idle dreamer might attempt to push one star closer to another.
An astronomer would not do that.
He was going blind. He could no more do his work without his eyes than
the daylight could come without the sun. Fate jeered at him: "Your eyes
are gone, but your life will remain." It was like saying to the sun: "You
are not to give any more light, but you are to go on shining just the
same."
He was going blind. The world which had just opened to him--the world of
sunsets and forests and mountains and seas gulped to black nothingness!
Blind! Swept under by a trick he would not have believed possible from
his most careless student! Mastered by the things he had believed he
controlled! Meeting his life's destruction from the things which were to
bring his life's triumph! In that moment of understanding's throwing wide
her gates to torture, fate stood out as the master dramatist.
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