p step with him easily and surely, her cheeks glowing with
the brisk movement; and she could tell him with uncanny exactness when
they came abreast of the old elk paddock and the bowling greens, or
the rock groynes and bathhouse at Second Beach. She knew always when
they turned the wide curve farther out, where through a fringe of
maple and black alder there opened a clear view of all the Gulf, with
steamers trailing their banners of smoke and the white pillar of
Point Atkinson lighthouse standing guard at the troubled entrance to
Howe Sound.

No, he could not easily fall into the masculine attitude of a
protector, of guiding and bending a watchful care upon a helpless bit
of desirable femininity that clung to him with confiding trust. Doris
Cleveland was too buoyantly healthy to be a clinging vine. She had too
hardy an intellectual outlook. Her mind was like her body, vigorous,
resilient, unafraid. It was hard sometimes for Hollister to realize
fully that to those gray eyes so often turned on him it was always
night,--or at best a blurred, unrelieved dusk.

In the old, comfortable days before the war, Hollister, like many
other young men, accepted things pretty much as they came without
troubling to scrutinize their import too closely. It was easy for him,
then, to overlook the faint shadows than ran before coming events. It
had been the most natural thing in the world to drift placidly until
in more or less surprise he found himself caught fairly in a sweeping
current. Some of the most important turns in his life had caught him
unprepared for their denouement, left him a trifle dizzy as he found
himself committed irrevocably to this or that.

But he had not survived four years of bodily and spiritual disaster
without an irreparable destruction of the sanguine, if more or less
nebulous assurance that God was in his heaven and all was well with
the world. He had been stricken with a wariness concerning life, a
reluctant distrust of much that in his old easy-going philosophy
seemed solid as the hills. He was disposed to a critical and sometimes
pessimistic examination of his own feelings and of other people's
actions.

So love for Doris Cleveland did not steal upon him like a thief in the
night. From the hour when he put her in the taxi at the dock and went
away with her address in his pocket, he was keenly alive to the
definite quality of attraction peculiar to her. When he was not
thinking of her, he was thinking