"That depends," Lawanne said absently.

But he did not explain upon what it depended. He leaned back in his
chair, a cigarette in his fingers, and stared for a minute up at the
trees.

"I'll get the rest of it pounded out in two or three days," he came
back to his book, "then I think I'll go up the Little Toba, just to
see what that wild-looking gorge is like twenty or thirty miles back.
Better come along with me. Do you good. You're sort of at a
standstill."

"I can't," Hollister explained. "Doris is coming back next week."

Lawanne looked at him intently.

"Eyes all right?"

"I don't know. I suppose so," Hollister replied. "She didn't say. She
merely wrote that she was coming on the Wednesday steamer."

"Well, that'll be all right too," Lawanne said. "You'll get over being
so down in the mouth then."

"Maybe," Hollister muttered.

"Of course. What rot to think anything else."

Hollister did not contradict this. It was what he wanted to feel and
think, and could not. He understood that Lawanne, whatever his
thought, was trying to hearten him. And he appreciated that, although
he knew the matter rested in his wife's own hands and nothing any one
else could do or say had the slightest bearing on it. His meeting with
Doris would be either an ordeal or a triumph.

"I might get Charlie Mills to go with me," Lawanne pursued his own
thought.

"Mills didn't go out with the rest of the crew?" Hollister asked. He
knew, of course, that Charlie Mills was still in the Toba valley
because he had seen him with his own eyes not more than half an hour
earlier. His question, however, was not altogether idle. He wondered
whether Mills had gone out and come back, or if he had not left at
all.

"No. He turned back at the last minute, for some reason. He's camping
in one of the old T. & T. shacks below Carr's. I rather like Mills.
He's interesting when you can get him to loosen up. Queer, tense sort
of beggar at times, though. A good man to go into the hills with--to
go anywhere with--although he might not show to great advantage in a
drawing-room. By Jove, you know, Hollister, it doesn't seem like nine
months since I settled down in this cabin. Now I'm about due to go
back to the treadmill."

"Do you have to?" Hollister asked. "If this satisfies you, why not
come back again after you've had a fling at the outside?"

"I can't, very well," Lawanne for the first time touched on his
personal affairs, that life which he led