She
laughed now to think of how she had gone at the thing--not even studying
out the alphabet first. In the candle-light, she had sat on the edge of
her bed--there was no other furniture in the room--with one of Kirk's
books on her knee. Looking at the dots embossed on the paper conveyed
nothing to her; she shut her eyes, and felt the page with a forefinger
which immediately seemed to her as large as a biscuit. Nothing but the
dreadful darkness, and the discouraging little humps on the paper which
would not even group themselves under her fingers! Felicia had ended her
first attempt at mastering Braille, in tears--but not altogether over
her own failure.
"Oh, it must be hideous for him!" she quavered to the empty room;
"simply hideous!"
And she opened her eyes, thankful to see even good candle-light on bare
walls, and the green, star-hung slip of sky outside the window. But
somehow the seeing of it had made her cry again.
Next day she had swallowed her pride and asked Kirk to explain to her a
few of the mysteries of the embossed letters. He was delighted, and
picked the alphabet, here and there, from a page chosen at random in the
big book. The dots slunk at once into quite sensibly ordered ranks, and
Felicia perceived a reason, an excuse for their existence.
She learned half the alphabet in an hour, and picked out _b_ and _h_ and
_l_ joyfully from page after page. Three days later she was reading,
"The cat can catch the mouse"--as thrilled as a scientist would be to
discover a new principle of physics.
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