all.

But his eyes, which had miraculously escaped injury, could still glow
with the old fire, or grow dull and lifeless, giving some index to the
mutations of his mind. And those darkly blue eyes, undimmed beacons
amid the wreckage of his features, burned and gleamed now with a
strange fire.

The woman who had been standing there staring up the hillside, with
the sun playing hide and seek in her yellow hair, was Myra Hollister,
his wife.

CHAPTER VI

Hollister sat in the snow, his gaze fixed upon this house on the river
bank, wrestling with all the implications of this incredible
discovery. He could neither believe what he had seen nor deny the
evidence of his vision. He kept watch, with the glasses ready to fix
upon the woman if she emerged again. But she did not reappear. The
cold began to chill his body, to stiffen his limbs. He rose at last
and made his way along the cliff, keeping always a close watch on the
house below until he came abreast of his own quarters and turned
reluctantly into the hollow where the cedars masked the log cabin.

He cooked a meal and ate his food in a mechanical sort of abstraction,
troubled beyond measure, rousing himself out of periods of
concentration in which there seemed, curiously, to be two of him
present,--one questioning and wondering, the other putting forward
critical and sneering answers, pointing out the folly of his wonder.

In the end he began to entertain a real doubt not only of the
correctness of his sight, but also of his sanity. For it was clearly
impossible, his reason insisted, that Myra would be pioneering in
those snowy solitudes, that she should live in a rude shack among
stumps on the fringe of a wilderness. She had been a creature of
luxury. Hollister could not conceive a necessity for her doing this.
He had so arranged his affairs when he went to France that she had
access to and complete control of his fortune. When she disclosed to
him by letter the curious transformation of her affections, he had not
revoked that arrangement. In the bewildering shock of that disclosure
his first thought had not been a concern for his property. And the
official report of him as killed in action which followed so soon
after had allowed her to reap the full benefit of this situation. When
she left London, if indeed she had left London, with her new associate
in the field of emotion she had at least forty-five thousand dollars
in negotiable securities.

And if