d. In all
his life Hollister had never gone about consciously looking upon women
with a lustful eye. But he understood life, its curious
manifestations, its sensory demands, its needs. For a long time pain,
grief, suffering of body and anguish of mind had suppressed in him
every fluttering of desire. He had accepted that apparent snuffing out
of passion thankfully. Where, he had said to himself when he thought
of this, where would he find such a woman as he could love who would
find pleasure in the embrace of a marred thing like himself? Ah, no.
He had seen them shrink too often from mere sight of his twisted face.
The fruits of love were not for the plucking of such as he. Therefore
he was glad that the urge of sex no longer troubled him.

Yet here in a brief span, amid these silent hills and dusky forests
where he had begun to perceive that life might still have
compensations for him, this passivity had been overthrown, swept away,
destroyed. He could not look out over the brow of that cliff without
thinking of the woman in the valley below. He could not think of her
without the floodgates of his recollection loosing their torrents. He
had slept with her head pillowed in the crook of his arm. He had been
wakened by the warm pressure of her lips on his. All the tender
intimacies of their life together had lurked in his subconsciousness,
to rise and torture him now.

And it was torture. He would tramp far along those slopes and when he
looked too long at some distant peak he would think of Myra. He would
sit beside his fireplace with one of Doris Cleveland's books in his
hand and the print would grow blurred and meaningless. In the glow of
the coals Myra's face would take form and mock him with a seductive
smile. Out of the gallery of his mind pictures would come trooping,
and in each the chief figure was that fair-haired woman who had been
his wife. At night while he slept, he was hounded by dreams in which
the conscious repression of his waking hours went by the board and he
was delivered over to the fantastic deviltries of the subconscious.

Hollister had never been a sentimental fool, nor a sensualist whose
unrestrained passions muddied the streams of his thought. But he was a
man, aware of both mind and body. Neither functioned mechanically.
Both were complex. By no effort of his will could he command the blood
in his veins to course less hotly. By no exercise of any power he
possessed could he force his mind al