uch of his hand?
Hollister's intelligence answered "No." For externally his appearance
would have been a shock, would have inhibited the pleasant intimacy at
which they so soon arrived.

Doris made light of his disfigurement. She could comprehend clearly
many things unseen--but not that. Hollister knew she must have created
some definite image of him in her mind; something, he suspected, which
must correspond closely to her ideal of a man, something that was dear
to her. If that ideal did not--and his intelligence insisted that he
could not--survive the reality, then his house was built on sand and
must topple.

And he must dig and pry at the foundations. He must do all that could
be done for her eyes. That was her right,--to see, to be free of her
prison of darkness, to be restored to the sight of beauty, to
unclouded vision of the world and all it contained, no matter what the
consequence to him. He would play the game, although he felt that he
would lose.

A cloud seemed to settle on him when he considered that he might lose
everything that made life worth while. And it would be an irrevocable
loss. He would never again have courage to weave the threads of his
existence into another such goodly pattern. Even if he had the
courage, he would never have the chance. No such fortuitous
circumstances would ever again throw him into the arms of a
woman,--not such a woman as Doris Cleveland.

Hollister looked at her beside him, and his heart ached to think that
presently she might not sit so with her hand on his knee, looking up
at him with lips parted in a happy smile, gray eyes eager with
anticipation under the long, curving, brown lashes. She was so very
dear to him. Not alone because of the instinctive yearning of flesh to
flesh, not altogether because of the grace of her vigorous young body,
the comeliness of her face, the shining coils of brown hair that gave
him a strange pleasure just to stroke. Not alone because of the quick,
keen mind that so often surprised him by its sureness. There was some
charm more subtle than these, something to which he responded without
knowing clearly what it was, something that made the mere knowledge of
her presence in his house a comfort, no matter whether he was beside
her or miles away.

Lawanne once said to him that a man must worship a God, love a woman,
or find a real friendship, to make life endurable. God was too dim,
too nebulous, for Hollister's need. Friendship was alm