e Doris
was rolling pie crust on a board.

"We're off," he said, putting an arm around her. "If we can keep this
up all summer, I'll build a new wing on the house and bring you in a
piano to play with this winter."

Hollister himself now took a hand at cutting cedar. Each morning he
climbed that steep slope to the works, and each night he came trudging
down; and morning and night he would pause at a point where the trail
led along the rim of a sheer cliff, to look down on the valley below,
to look down on the roof of his own house and upon Bland's house
farther on. Sometimes smoke streamed blue from Bland's stovepipe.
Sometimes it stood dead, a black cylinder above the shake roof.
Sometimes one figure and sometimes two moved about the place; more
often no one stirred. But that was as near as the Blands had come in
eight weeks. Hollister had an unspoken hope that they would remain
distant, no matter that Doris occasionally wondered about this woman
who lived around the river's curve, what she was like and when she
would meet her. Hollister knew nothing of Bland, nothing of Myra. He
did not wish to know. It did not matter in the least, he assured
himself. He was dead and Myra was married. All that old past was as a
book long out of print. It could not possibly matter if by chance they
came in contact. Yet he had a vague feeling that it did matter,--a
feeling for which he could not account. He was not afraid; he had no
reason to be afraid. Nevertheless he gazed sometimes from the cliff
top down on the cabin where Bland and Myra lived, and something
stirred him so that he wished them gone.

He came off the hill one evening in the middle of June to find a canoe
drawn up on the beach, two Siwashes puttering over a camp fire, and a
tall, wirily slender, fair-haired man who might have been anywhere
between twenty-seven and thirty-five sitting in the front doorway,
talking to Doris.

Hollister noted the expression on the man's face when their eyes met.
But he did not mind. He was used to that. He was becoming indifferent
to what people thought of his face, because what they thought no
longer had power to hurt him, to make him feel that sickening
depression, to make him feel himself kin to those sinners who were
thrust into the outer darkness. Moreover, he knew that some people
grew used to the wreckage of his features. That had been his
experience with his two woodsmen. At first they looked at him askance.
Now they seemed