y skirmishing. But she was here
all afternoon, and we didn't spend five hours talking about the
weather."

"What did you talk about then?" Hollister asked curiously.

"Men and women and money mostly," Doris replied. "If one may judge a
woman by the impressionistic method, I should say that Mrs. Bland
would be very attractive to men."

It was on the tip of Hollister's tongue to say, "She is." Instead he
murmured, "Is that why you were doubting me? Think I'm apt to fall in
love with this charming lady?"

"No," Doris said thoughtfully. "It wasn't anything concrete like that.
It's a feeling, a mood, I suppose. And it's silly for me to say things
like that. If you grow sorry you married me, if you fall in love with
another woman, I'll know it without being told."

She pinched his cheek playfully and lay silent beside him. Hollister
watched the slow shift of the moonbeams across the foot of the bed,
thinking, his mind darting sketchily from incident to incident of the
past, peering curiously into the misty future, until at last he grew
aware by her drooped eyelashes and regular breathing that Doris was
asleep.

He grew drowsy himself. His eyelids grew heavy. Presently he was
asleep also and dreaming of a fantastic struggle in which Myra
Bland--transformed into a vulture-like creature with a fierce beaked
face and enormous strength--tore him relentlessly from the arms of his
wife.

CHAPTER XIII

From day to day and from week to week, apprehending mistily that he
was caught in and carried along by a current--a slow but irresistible
movement of events--Hollister pursued the round of his daily life as
if nothing but a clear and shining road lay before him; as if he had
done for ever with illusions and uncertainties and wild stirrings of
the spirit; as if life spread before him like a sea of which he had a
chart whereon every reef was marked, every shoal buoyed, and in his
hands and brain the instruments and knowledge wherewith to run a true
course. He made himself believe that he was reasonably safe from the
perils of those uneasy waters. Sometimes he was a little in doubt, not
so sure of untroubled passage. But mostly he did not think of these
potential dangers.

He was vitally concerned, as most men are, with making a living. The
idea of poverty chafed him. He had once been a considerable toad in a
sizable puddle. He had inherited a competence and lost it, and power
to reclaim it was beyond him. He wasted n