was simple enough. Each, in common with all humanity, pursued the
elusive shadow of happiness. The diverging paths along which they
pursued it had brought them to this common point.

Hollister soaped and scrubbed to clean his hands and face of the sweat
and dirt of his day's labor. Above the wash bench Myra's face,
delicately pink and white and framed by her hair that was the color of
strained honey, looked down at him through an open window. Her blue
eyes rested on him, searchingly, he thought, with a curious appraisal,
as if he were something to be noted and weighed and measured by the
yardstick of her estimation of men. If she only knew, Hollister
reflected sardonically, with his face buried in the towel, what a
complete and intimate knowledge she had of him!

Looking up suddenly, his eyes met hers fixed unwaveringly upon him and
for an instant his heart stood still with the reasonless conviction
that she did know, she must know, that she could not escape knowing.
There was a quality of awareness in her steady gaze that terrified him
for a moment by its implication, which made him feel as if he stood
over a powder magazine and that she held the detonator in her hand.
But immediately he perceived the absurdity of his momentary panic.
Myra turned her head to speak to Doris. She smiled, the old dimpling
smile which gave him a strange feeling to see again. Certainly his
imagination was playing him tricks. How could she know? And what would
she care if she did know,--so long as he made no claims, so long as he
let the dead past lie in its grave. For Myra was as deeply concerned
to have done with their old life as he. He rested upon that assumption
and went into the house and sat down to his supper.

Later, towards sundown, Myra went home. Hollister watched her vanish
among the thickets, thinking that she too had changed,--as greatly as
himself. She had been timid once, reluctant to stay alone over night
in a house with telephones and servants, on a street brilliantly
lighted. Now she could apparently face the loneliness of those
solitudes without uneasiness. But war and the aftermath of war had
taught Hollister that man adapts himself to necessity when he must,
and he suspected that women were not greatly different. He understood
that after all he had never really known Myra any more than she had
known him. Externally they had achieved knowledge of each other
through sight, speech, physical contact, comprehension of e