carried this way and that in the great, cruel,
indifferent swirl that was life. He could understand a great many
things about her and about himself, about men as men and women as
women, that he would have denied in the days before the war.

But while he could think about himself and Myra Bland with a calmness
that approached indifference, he could not think with that same
detachment about Doris. She had come, walking fearlessly in her
darkened world, to him in his darkened world of discouragement and
bitterness. There was something fine and true in this blind girl,
something that Hollister valued over and above the flesh-and-blood
loveliness of her, something rare and precious that he longed to keep.
He could not define it; he simply knew that it resided in her, that it
was a precious quality that set her apart in his eyes from all other
women.

But would it stand the test of sight? If he were as other men he would
not have been afraid; he would scarcely have asked himself that
question. But he knew he would be like a stranger to her, a strange
man with a repellingly scarred face. He did not believe she could
endure that, she who loved beauty so, who was sensitive to subtleties
of tone and atmosphere beyond any woman he had ever known. Hollister
tried to put himself in her place. Would he have taken her to his
arms as gladly, as joyously, if she had come to him with a face
twisted out of all semblance to its natural lines? And Hollister could
not say. He did not know.

He threw up his head at last, in a desperate sort of resolution. In a
week he would know. Meantime--

He had no work to occupy him now. There were a few bolts behind the
boom-sticks which he would raft to the mill at his leisure. He walked
up to the chute mouth now and looked about. A few hundred yards up the
hill the line of green timber ended against the black ruin of the
fire. There the chute ended also. Hollister walked on across the rocky
point, passed the waterfall that was shrinking under the summer heat,
up to a low cliff where he sat for a long time looking down on the
river.

When he came back at last to the house, Myra was there, busy at her
self-imposed tasks in those neglected rooms. Hollister sat down on the
porch steps. He felt a little uneasy about her being there, uneasy for
her. In nearly two weeks of fighting fire he had been thrown in
intimate daily contact with Jim Bland, and his appraisal of Bland's
character was less and les