eathlessly.
"And I'm a woman. I'm blind--but I'm a woman. I've been wondering how
long it would take you to find that out."

CHAPTER IX

Not until Hollister had left Doris at her cousin's home and was
walking back downtown did a complete realization of what he had done
and pledged himself to do burst upon him. When it did, he pulled up
short in his stride, as if he had come physically against some
forthright obstruction. For an instant he felt dazed. Then a consuming
anger flared in him,--anger against the past by which he was still
shackled.

But he refused to be bound by those old chains whose ghostly clanking
arose to harass him in this hour when life seemed to be holding out a
new promise, when he saw happiness beckoning, when he was dreaming of
pleasant things. He leaned over the rail on the Granville Street
drawbridge watching a tug pass through, seeing the dusky shape of the
small vessel, hearing the ripple of the flood tide against the stone
piers, and scarcely conscious of the bridge or the ship or the gray
dimness of the sea, so profound was the concentration of his mind on
this problem. It did not perplex him; it maddened him. He whispered a
defiant protest to himself and walked on. He was able to think more
calmly when he reached his room. There were the facts, the simple,
undeniable facts, to be faced without shrinking,--and a decision to be
made.

For months Hollister, when he thought of the past, thought of it as a
slate which had been wiped clean. He was dead, officially dead. His
few distant relatives had accepted the official report without
question. Myra had accepted it, acted upon it. Outside the British War
Office no one knew, no one dreamed, that he was alive. He had served
in the Imperials. He recalled the difficulties and delays of getting
his identity reestablished in the coldly impersonal, maddeningly
deliberate, official departments which dealt with his case. He had
succeeded. His back pay had been granted. A gratuity was still
forthcoming. But Hollister knew that the record of his case was
entangled with miles of red tape. He was dead--killed in action. It
would never occur to the British War Office to seek publicity for the
fact that he was not dead. There was no machinery for that purpose.
Even if there were such machinery, there was no one to pull the
levers. Nothing was ever set in motion in the War Office without
pulling a diversity of levers. So much for that. Hollister, r