know how she'll take it. And if when she sees me she
can't stand me--isn't that enough?"

"I shouldn't worry, if I were you," Lawanne encouraged. "Your wife is
a little different from the ordinary run of women, I think. And, take
it from me, no woman loves her husband for his Grecian profile alone.
Nine times out of ten a man's looks have nothing to do with what a
woman thinks of him, that is if she really knows him; whereas with a
man it is usually the other way about, until he learns by experience
that beauty isn't the whole works--which a clever woman knows
instinctively."

"Women shy away from the grotesque, the unpleasant," Hollister
declared. "You know they do. I had proof of that pretty well over two
years. So do men, for that matter. But the women are the worst. I've
seen them look at me as if I were a loathsome thing."

"Oh, rats," Lawanne returned irritably. "You're hyper-sensitive about
that face of yours. The women--well, take Mrs. Bland as an example. I
don't see that the condition of your face makes any great difference
to her. It doesn't appear to arouse any profound distaste on her
part."

Hollister could not counter that. But it was an argument which carried
no weight with him. For if Myra could look at him without a qualm,
Hollister knew it must be because her mind never quite relinquished
the impression of him as he used to be in the old days. And Doris had
nothing like that to mitigate the sweeping impression of first sight,
which Hollister feared with a fear he could not shake off by any
effort of his will.

He went on up to his own house. The maple tree thrust one heavy-leaved
branch over the porch. The doors were shut. All about the place hung
that heavy mantle of stillness which wraps a foresaken home, a
stillness in which not even a squirrel chattered or a blue-jay lifted
his voice, and in which nothing moved. He stood amid that silence,
hearing only a faint whisper from the river, a far-off monotone from
the falls beyond the chute. He felt a heaviness in his breast, a
sickening sense of being forsaken.

He went in, walked through the kitchen, looked into the bedroom, came
back to the front room, opening doors and windows to let in the sun
and air and drive out the faint, musty odor that gathers in a closed
house. A thin film of dust had settled on the piano, on chairs, on the
table. He stood in the middle of the room, abandoned to a horrible
depression. It was so still, so lonely, in t