ded tenaciously
in her mind, and whether it would survive the shock of reality? That
was the root of Hollister's fear, a definite well-grounded fear. He
found himself hoping that promise of sight would never be fulfilled,
that the veil would not be lifted, that they would go on as they were.
And he would feel ashamed of such a thought. Sight was precious. Who
was he to deny her that mercy,--she who loved the sun and the hills
and the sea; all the sights of earth and sky which had been shut away
so long; she who had crept into his arms many a time, weeping
passionate tears because all the things she loved were forever wrapped
in darkness?

If upon Hollister had been bestowed the power to grant her sight or to
withhold it, he would have shrunk from a decision. Because he loved
her he wished her to see, to experience the joy of dawn following that
long night in which she groped her way. But he dreaded lest that light
gladdening her eyes should mean darkness for him, a darkness in which
everything he valued would be lost.

Then some voice within him whispered suggestively that in this
darkness Myra would be waiting with outstretched hands,--and Hollister
frowned and tried not to think of that.

CHAPTER XIX

At noon next day Hollister left the mess-house table and went out to
sit in the sun and smoke a pipe beyond the Rabelaisian gabble of his
crew. While he sat looking at the peaks north of the valley, from
which the June sun was fast stripping even the higher snows, he saw a
man bent under a shoulder pack coming up the slope that dropped away
westward toward the Toba's mouth. He came walking by stumps and
through thickets until he was near the camp. Then Hollister recognized
him as Charlie Mills. He saw Hollister, came over to where he sat, and
throwing off his pack made a seat of it, wiping away the sweat that
stood in shining drops on his face.

"Well, I'm back, like the cat that couldn't stay away," Mills said.

The same queer undercurrent of melancholy, of sadness, the same hint
of pain colored his words,--a subtle matter of inflection, of tone.
The shadowy expression of some inner conflict hovered in his dark
eyes. Again Hollister felt that indefinable urge of sympathy for this
man who seemed to suffer with teeth grimly clenched, so that no
complaint ever escaped him. A strange man, tenacious of his black
moods.

"How's everything?" Mills asked. "You've made quite a hole here since
I left. Can I go t