Doris Cleveland was the outstanding factor in this change.

Each time he met her, he breathed a prayer of thanks for her
blindness, which permitted her to accept him as a man instead of
shrinking from him as a monster. Just as the man secure in the
knowledge that he possesses the comfort and security of a home can
endure with fortitude the perils and hardships of a bitter trial, so
Hollister could walk the streets of Vancouver now, indifferent to the
averted eyes, the quick glance of reluctant pity. He could get through
the days without brooding. Loneliness no longer made him shudder with
its clammy touch.

For that he could thank Doris Cleveland, and her alone. He saw her
nearly every day. She was the straw to which he, drowning, clung with
all his might. The most depressing hours that overtook him were those
in which he visualized her floating away beyond his reach.

To Hollister, as he saw more of her, she seemed the most remarkable
woman he had ever known. Her loss of sight had been more than
compensated by an extraordinary acuteness of mental vision. The world
about her might now be one of darkness, but she had a precise
comprehension of its nature, its manifestations, its complexities. He
had always taken blindness as a synonym for helplessness, a matter of
uncertain groping, of timidities, of despair. He revised that
conclusion sharply in her case. He could not associate the most remote
degree of helplessness with Doris Cleveland when they walked, for
instance, through Stanley Park from English Bay to Second Beach. That
broad path, with the Gulf swell muttering along the bouldery shore on
one side and the wind whispering in the lofty branches of tall trees
on the other, was a favorite haunt of theirs on crisp March days. The
buds of the pussy willow were beginning to burst. Birds twittered in
dusky thickets. Even the gulls, wheeling and darting along the shore,
had a new note in their raucous crying. None of these first undertones
of the spring symphony went unmarked by Doris Cleveland. She could
hear and feel. She could respond to subtle, external stimuli. She
could interpret her thoughts and feelings with apt phrases, with a
whimsical humor,--sometimes with an appealing touch of wistfulness.

At the Beach Avenue entrance to the park she would release herself
from the hand by which Hollister guided her through the throngs on the
sidewalks or the traffic of the crossings, and along the open way she
would kee