few sticks from a pile
of split wood. The door closed upon her once more.

Hollister turned upon the instant, retraced his steps across the flat,
gained the foot of the steep hill and climbed step by step with
prodigious effort in the deep snow until he reached the cabin.

He had reaffirmed the evidence of his eyes, and was no longer troubled
by the vague fear that a disordered imagination had played him a
disturbing trick. He had looked on his wife's face beyond a question.
He accepted this astounding fact as a man must accept the indubitable.
She was here in the flesh,--this fair-haired, delicate-skinned woman
whose arms and lips had once been his sure refuge. Here, in a rude
cabin on the brink of a frozen river, chance had set her neighbor to
him. To what end Hollister neither knew nor wished to inquire. He said
to himself that it did not matter. He repeated this aloud. He believed
it to be true. How _could_ it matter now?

But he found that it did matter in a way that he had not reckoned
upon. For he found that he could not ignore her presence there. He
could not thrust her into the outer darkness beyond the luminous
circle of his thoughts. She haunted him with a troublesome insistence.
He had loved her. She had loved him. If that love had gone glimmering
there still remained memory from which he could not escape, memories
of caresses and embraces, of mutual passion, of all they had been to
each other through a time when they desired only to be all things to
each other. These things arose like ghosts out of forgotten chambers
in his mind. He could not kill memory, and since he was a man, a
physically perfect man, virile and unspent, memory tortured him.

He could not escape the consequences of being, the dominant impulses
of life. No normal man can. He may think he can. He may rest secure
for a time in that belief,--but it will fail him. And of this
Hollister now became aware.

He made every effort to shake off this new besetment, this fresh
assault upon the tranquility he had attained. But he could not abolish
recollection. He could not prevent his mind from dwelling upon this
woman who had once meant so much to him, nor his flesh from responding
to the stimulus of her nearness. When a man is thirsty he must drink.
When he is hungry food alone can satisfy that hunger. And there arose
in Hollister that ancient sex-hunger from which no man may escape.

It had been dormant in him for a time; dormant but not dea