“But each week you see a little less.”

“Yes.”

“Your father’s eyes?”

“Green,” she said, after a short pause.

Rizzo looked pleased with this. “I was thinking if he had a problem like your own.”

“No,” she said. “His eyes were always clear.”

“And your mother’s?”

“She died young. I was seven. I don’t remember her eyes.”

“Sisters, brothers . . . ?”

“They are both well,” she said.

“Except the teeth,” said Rizzo. He went to the desk, opened the drawer and took out a magnifying glass. It did not look particularly medical. More like an heirloom. He stared through the lens into Emily’s left eye, then the right. He muttered to himself. He scratched the bridge of his nose. Minutes passed. A slant of sunlight crossed the room. It lit the blue of Emily’s shoulder, the grey of Rizzo’s coat cuff, one of the knees of Lacroix’s trousers, then broke on the skirting board behind him in an eye-wide patch of light containing the rippling of tiny shadows, fern-like and hard to explain.

The cathedral bells sounded the half-hour. Rizzo seemed to wake from a dream of looking. He stood, returned his glass to the drawer, closed the drawer and took hold of his own elbows.

“The first thing I must tell you,” he said, “is that I do not know if I can be of assistance to you. Help you.” He waited.

Emily nodded. “And what is the next thing?” she asked.

“Next?”

“That was the first thing,” she said. “So there must be another. A second thing.”

“There is,” said Rizzo. “I can give you drops for your eyes. Belladonna. Or a tincture of aconite. I can give you a little bottle and three times each day you lean back your head and put the drops in your eyes. It is very simple.”

“It will cure me?”

“No,” said Rizzo. “It will not cure you.”

“Will it help me?”

“It may do. It may.”

She dropped her gaze to her lap, the blue bonnet, then looked up at Rizzo again. “I was hoping for more,” she said.

“Of course,” said Rizzo.

“I think I will be blind before the year is out,” she said.

“You wish me to operate on you,” said Rizzo.

“Can you?” asked Lacroix, who had been watching them intently.

“There is a procedure,” said Rizzo. “It has existed for many years, though in a very imperfect form. Recently, in Vienna and in Paris, there have been great advances. A colleague of mine at the Salpêtrière has performed it several times.”

“And you?” asked Emily. “Have you performed it?”

“He has sent me his drawings,” said Rizzo. He gestured to his desk. “Despite the war, Paris still speaks to Glasgow. The drawing are very exact. Rather beautiful. I have studied them. I have seen their . . . logic.”

“And what does it involve?” asked Lacroix. “The procedure?”