ke that to him; all the
years that stretched ahead of him might be as barren as that black
waste.

His mind projected itself into the future from every possible angle.
He did not belittle Doris' love, her sympathy, her understanding. He
even conceded that no matter how his disfigurement affected her, she
would try to put that behind her, she would make an effort to cling to
him. And Hollister could see the deadly impact of his grotesque
features upon her delicate sensibility, day after day, month after
month, until she could no longer endure it, or him. She loved the
beautiful too well, perfection of line and form and color. Restored
sight must alter her world; her conception of him must become
transformed. The magic of the unseen would lose its glamor. All that
he meant to her as a man, a lover, a husband, must be stripped bare of
the kindly illusion that blindness had wrapped him in. Even if she did
not shrink in amazed reluctance at first sight, she must soon cease to
have for him any keener emotion than a tolerant pity. And Hollister
did not want that. He would not take it as a gift--not from Doris; he
could not.

Love, home, all that sweet companionship which he had gained, the
curious man-pride he had in that morsel of humanity that was his
son,--he wondered if he were to see all these slowly or swiftly
withdrawn from him?

Well, he would soon know. He stood up and looked far along the valley.
Suddenly it seemed a malevolent place, oppressive, threatening, grim
in spite of its beauty. It seemed as if something had been lurking
there ready to strike. The fire had swept away his timber. In that
brilliant sunshine, amid all that beauty, Myra's life had been snuffed
out like a blown candle flame--to no purpose. Or was there some
purpose in it all? Was some sentient force chastening him, scourging
him with rods for the good of his soul? Was it for some such
inscrutable purpose that men died by the hundred thousand in Europe?
Was that why Doris Cleveland had been deprived of her sight? Why Myra
had been torn by contradictory passions during her troubled life and
had perished at last, a victim of passions that burst control? All
this evil that some hidden good might accrue? Hollister bared his
teeth in defiance of such a conclusion. But he was in a mood to defy
either gods or devils. In that mood he saw the Toba valley, the whole
earth, as a sinister place,--a place where beauty was a mockery, where
impassive silenc