y
the labor of his hands.

All his life Hollister had been able to command money without effort.
Until he came back from the war he did not know what it meant to be
poor. He had known business as a process in which a man used money to
make more money. He had been accustomed to buy and sell, to deal with
tokens rather than with things themselves. Now he found himself at the
primitive source of things and he learned, a little to his
astonishment, the pride of definitely planned creative work. He began
to understand that lesson which many men never learn, the pleasure of
pure achievement even in simple things.

For two or three days he occupied himself at various tasks on the
flat. He did this to keep watch over Doris, to see that she did not
come to grief in this unfamiliar territory. But he soon put aside
those first misgivings, as he was learning to put aside any fear of
the present or of the future, which arose from her blindness. His love
for her had not been borne of pity. He had never thought of her as
helpless. She was too vivid, too passionately alive in body and mind
to inspire him with that curiously mixed feeling which the strong
bestow upon the maimed and the weak. But there were certain risks of
which he was conscious, no matter that Doris laughingly disclaimed
them. With a stick and her ears and fingers she could go anywhere, she
said; and she was not far wrong, as Hollister knew.

Within forty-eight hours she had the run of the house and the cleared
portion of land surrounding. She could put her hand on every item of
her kitchen equipment. She could get kindling out of the wood box;
light a fire in the stove as well as he. All the stock of food staples
lay in an orderly arrangement of her own choice on the kitchen
shelves. She knew every object in the two rooms, each chair and box
and stool, the step at the front door, the short path to the river
bank, the trunk of the branchy maple, the rugged bark of a great
spruce behind the house, as if within her brain there existed an exact
diagram of the whole and with which as a guide she could move within
those limits as swiftly and surely as Hollister himself.

He never ceased to wonder at the mysterious delicacies of touch and
hearing which served her so well in place of sight. But he accepted
the fact, and once she had mastered her surroundings Hollister was
free to take up his own work, no matter where it led him. Doris
insisted that he should. She had a s