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myself.”
    “Did I ask you to?” He sighed heavily. “I hate being blind.”
    “Yes, I know.” “Do you?” His voice was harsh with sarcasm. “But
     
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    then, you think I’m having hysterics, don’t you, Nurse, so why the sympathy in your voice?”
    “You won’t try to understand what the term means, will you?” she shot back. “Would you rather enjoy your temporary affliction, Mr. van der Vere? Does it please you to hurt other people out of your own refusal to help yourself?”
    He seemed to grow taller, and his face became rigid, like stone. “If you were a man…” he began hotly.
    “If I were a man, I’d be an archaeologist,” she said pleasantly, “out digging up old bones. I wouldn’t be a nurse, so I wouldn’t be here, and you’d have no one to yell at then, would you?”
    He said a rough word under his breath and his chiseled lips made a thin line. At his sides his powerful hands clenched convulsively.
    “Would you like to go swimming with me, Miss Steele?” he said after a minute.
    “No, sir, I would not. And shame on you for what you’re thinking. The shark would only get indigestion.”
    He seemed to be muffling a laugh, but he couldn’t stop the sound from his throat. It was a delightful sound, full of rich humor and love of life. It was like music to Dana’s ears.
    “Lead me home, if you please,” he chuckled, “The sea is too tempting, I confess.”
    “It’s for your own good that I prod you, sir,” she said as they walked along the beach. “Self-pity is self-defeating, you know.”
    “Was I feeling sorry for myself?” he mused. He stumbled, cursed and pulled himself erect. “Stop leading me into rocks.”
    “That was a piece of driftwood, and if you’d pick
     
    up your feet instead of shuffling along, disturbing sand crabs, you wouldn’t trip,” she returned with a grin. “Witch,” he accused.
    “No wonder you wanted to get me in the water,” she mumbled. “You wanted to find out if I’d float, right?”
    He shook his head. “I think I’ve met my match,” he murmured. “Tell me something, miss. If you and the doctors are wrong, and the blindness is not hysterical, what then? Do you move in to lead me around for the rest of my life?”
    She was convinced that the doctors wouldn’t have made such a mistake, not with the battery of tests that had been done. But she was weary of arguing the point.
    “If they’re wrong,” she said, stressing the first word, “then you learn to live with it. There are fantastic developments in computer science that deal with blindness-as I’m sure you know from your involvement in that field.”
    “Yes, I know,” he said quietly. “In fact, one of my engineers developed a braille system that allows the blind access to other blind people through their computers.”
    “You see? It isn’t a closed door you’re facing. And will you consider one other thing?”
    “What?”
    “That God gives us obstacles for reasons?”
    “God,” he said, “did not make me blind. I did that all by myself, so why should I expect Him to help me?”
    “Why shouldn’t you?” she countered. “I suspect you’re not a religious man.”
    “You suspect correctly.”
    “What are you doing about it?” she asked. “What do you do to justify your existence?”
     
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    “I work for myself,” he said gruffly.
    “And for financial gain.”
    “Of course. What other reason is there?” he grumbled. “I am not a philanthropist.”
    “Obviously,”
    He shifted restlessly. ”Don’t try to toss a mantle of guilt over me, I give to charity.”
    “What do you give of yourself?”
    He stopped dead. “I beg your pardon?”
    “What do you give of yourself? Money is vulgar.”
    “So speaks one without it,” he returned coldly. “It never ceases to amaze me that the people who complain the most about the way wealth is distributed are