d written to her the
day before the fire broke out. He could not recall precisely what he
wrote, but he had tried to make clear to her what troubled him and
why. And her reply was brief, uncommonly brief for Doris, who had the
faculty of expressing herself fully and freely.

Hollister laid the letter on the table. The last line of that short
missive kept repeating itself over and over, as if his brain were a
phonograph which he had no power to stop playing:

"I shall be home next week on the Wednesday boat."

He got up and walked across the room, crossed and recrossed it half a
dozen times. And with each step those words thrust at him with deadly
import. He had deluded himself for a while. He had thought he could
beat the game in spite of his handicap. He had presumed for a year to
snap his fingers and laugh in the face of Fate, and Fate was to have
the last laugh.

He seemed to have a fatalistic sureness about this. He made a
deliberate effort to reason about it, and though his reason assumed
that when a woman like Doris Cleveland loved a man she did not love
him for the unblemished contours of his face, there was still that
deep-rooted, unreasoning feeling that however she might love him as
the unseen, the ideal lover, she must inevitably shrink from the
reality.

He stood still for a few seconds. In the living quarters of his house
there was, by deliberate intention, no mirror. Among Hollister's
things there was a small hand glass before which he shaved off the
hairs that grew out of the few patches of unscarred flesh about his
chin, those fragments of his beard which sprouted in grotesquely
separated tufts. But in the bedroom they had arranged for the
housekeeper there was a large oval glass above a dresser. Into this
room Hollister now walked and stood before the mirror staring at his
face.

No, he could not blame her, any one, for shrinking from _that_. And
when the darting shuttle of his thought reminded him that Myra did not
shrink from it, he went out to the front room and with his body sunk
deep in a leather chair he fell to pondering on this. But it led him
nowhere except perhaps to a shade of disbelief in Myra and her
motives, a strange instinctive distrust both of her and himself.

He recognized Myra's power. He had succumbed to it in the old careless
days and gloried in his surrender. He perceived that her compelling
charm was still able to move him as it did other men. He knew that
Myra had been