here. His mind, quick to
form images, likened it to a crypt, a tomb in which all his hopes laid
buried. That was the effect it had on him, this deserted house. His
intelligence protested against submitting to this acceptance of
disaster prior to the event, but his feelings overrode his
intelligence. If Doris had been lying white and still before him in
her coffin, he could not have felt more completely that sense of the
futility of life, of love, of hope, of everything. As he stood there,
one hand in his pocket, the other tracing with a forefinger an aimless
pattern in the dust on the piano, he perceived with remarkable clarity
that the unhappiness he had suffered, the loneliness he had endured
before he met Doris Cleveland was nothing to what now threatened, to
what now seemed to dog his footsteps with sinister portent.

In the bedroom occupied by their housekeeper stood the only mirror in
the house. Hollister went in there and stood before it, staring at the
presentment of himself in the glass. He turned away with a shiver. He
would not blame her if with clear vision she recoiled from that. He
could expect nothing else. Or would she endure that frightful mien
until she could first pity, then embrace? Hollister threw out his
hands in a swift gesture of uncertainty. He could only wait and see,
and meanwhile twist and turn upon the grid. He could not be calm and
detached and impersonal. For him there was too much at stake.

He left all the doors and windows wide and climbed the hill. If he
were to withstand the onslaught of these uncertainties, these
forebodings which pressed upon him with such damnable weight, he must
bestir himself. He must not sit down and brood. He knew that. It was
not with any particular enthusiasm that he came upon his crew at work,
that his eye marked the widening stump-dotted area where a year before
the cedars stood branch to branch, nor when he looked over the long
ricks of bolts waiting that swift plunge down the chute.

Bill Hayes gave a terse account of his stewardship during Hollister's
absence. So many cords of bolts cut and boomed and delivered to the
mill. Hollister's profits were accelerating, the fruit of an
insatiable market, of inflated prices. As he trudged down the hill, he
reflected upon that. He was glad in a way. If Doris could not or would
not live with him, he could make life easy for her and the boy. Money
would do that for them. With a strange perverseness, his mind dwelt