She was really
an extraordinary young woman, he decided.

She was traveling alone. For several months she had been living with
old friends of the family on Stuart Island, close by the roaring
tiderace of the Euclataw Rapids. She was returning there, she told
Hollister, after three weeks or so in Vancouver. The steamer would
dock about daylight the following morning. When Hollister offered to
see her ashore and to her destination, she accepted without any
reservations. It comforted Hollister's sadly bruised ego to observe
that she even seemed a trifle pleased.

"I have once or twice got a steward to get me ashore and put me in a
taxi," she said. "But if you don't mind, Mr. Hollister."

And Hollister most decidedly did not mind. Doris Cleveland had shot
like a pleasant burst of colorful light across the grayest period of
his existence, and he was loath to let her go.

He dropped off to sleep at last, to dream, strangely enough and with
astonishing vividness, of the cabin among the great cedars with the
snow banked white outside the door. He saw himself sitting beside the
fireplace poring over one of Doris Cleveland's books. And he was no
longer lonely, because he was not alone.

He smiled at himself, remembering this fantasy of the subconscious
mind, when the steward's rap at the door wakened him half an hour
before the steamer docked.

CHAPTER VIII

Quartered once more in the city he had abandoned two months earlier,
Hollister found himself in the grip of new desires, stirred by new
plans, his mind yielding slowly to the conviction that life was less
barren than it seemed. Or was that, he asked himself doubtfully, just
another illusion which would uphold him for awhile and then perish?
Not so many weeks since, a matter of days almost, life, so far as he
was concerned, held nothing, promised nothing. All the future years
through which he must live because of the virility of his body seemed
nothing but a dismal fog in which he must wander without knowing where
he went or what lay before him.

Now it seemed that he had mysteriously acquired a starting point and a
goal. He was aware of a new impetus. And since life had swept away a
great many illusions which he had once cherished as proven reality, he
did not shrink from or misunderstand the cause underlying this potent
change in his outlook. He pondered on this. He wished to be sure. And
he did not have to strain himself intellectually to understand that