nly when they put aside the formal language
of diagnosis and advised treatment did Hollister really fathom what
they were talking about. What they said then was simple. She must
cease to strain for sight of objects. She must live for a time in
neutral lights. The clearing up of her eyes could perhaps be helped by
certain ray treatments, certain forms of electrical massage, which
could be given in Vancouver as well as anywhere.

Whereupon the great men accepted their fees and departed.

So too did Hollister and his wife depart for the North again, where
they took a furnished apartment overlooking the Gulf of Georgia, close
to a beach where Robert junior could be wheeled in a pram by his
nurse. And Hollister settled himself to wait.

But it was weary work to nurse that sense of impending calamity, to
find his brain ceaselessly active upon the forecast of a future in
which he should walk alone, and while he was thus harassed still to
keep up a false cheerfulness before Doris. She was abnormally
sensitive to impressions. A tone spoke volumes to her. He did not wish
to disturb her by his own anxiety at this critical period.

All the while, little by little, her sight was coming She could
distinguish now any violent contrast of colors. The blurred detail of
form grew less pronounced. In the chaos of sensory impressions she
began to distinguish order; and, when she began to peer unexpectedly
at the people she met, at the chubby boy in his cot, at her husband's
face, Hollister could stand it no longer. He was afraid, afraid of
what he might see in those gray eyes if she looked at him too long,
too closely.

He was doubly sensitive now about his face because of those weeks
among strangers, of going about in crowded places where people stared
at him with every degree of morbid curiosity, exhibiting every shade
of feeling from a detached pity to open dislike of the spectacle he
presented. That alone weighed heavily on him. Inaction rasped at his
nerves. The Toba and his house, the grim peaks standing aloof behind
the timbered slopes, beckoned him back to their impassive, impersonal
silences, those friendly silences in which a man could sit and
think--and hope. A man doomed to death must prefer a swift end to a
lingering one. Hollister gradually came to the idea that he could not
possibly sit by and watch the light of comprehension steal slowly into
his wife's eyes. Better that she should fully regain her sight, and
then see