She put out her hand.  But either Mills did not see it or he shrank from contact, for he passed her and strode away, bent a little forward under his pack.  Myra turned to watch him.  When she faced about again there was a mistiness in her eyes, a curious, pathetic expression of pity on her face.  She went on into the house with scarcely a glance at Hollister.

In another week spring had ousted winter from his seasonal supremacy.  The snow on the lower levels vanished under a burst of warm rain.  The rain ceased and the clouds parted to let through a sun fast growing to full strength.  Buds swelled and burst on willow and alder.  The soil, warmed by the sun, sent up the first shoots of fern and grasses, a myriad fragile green tufts that would presently burst into flowers.  The Toba rose day by day, pouring down a swollen flood of snow-water to the sea.

And life went on as it always did.  Hollister’s crew, working on a bonus for work performed, kept the bolts of cedar gliding down the chute.  The mill on the river below swallowed up the blocks and spewed them out in bound bundles of roof covering.  Lawanne kept close to his cabin, deep in the throes of creation, manifesting strange vagaries of moroseness or exhilaration which in his normal state he cynically ascribed to the artistic temperament.  Bland haunted the creeks where the trout lurked, tramped the woods gun in hand, a dog at his heels, oblivious to everything but his own primitive, purposeless pleasures.

“I shouldn’t care to settle here for good,” he once said to Hollister.  “But really, you know, it’s not half bad.  If money wasn’t so dashed scarce.  It’s positively cruel for an estate to be so tied up that a man can’t get enough to live decently on.”

Bland irritated Hollister sometimes, but often amused him by his calm assurance that everything was always well in the world of J. Carrington Bland.  Hollister could imagine him in Norfolk and gaiters striding down an English lane, concerned only with his stable, his kennels, the land whose rentals made up his income.  There were no problems on Bland’s horizon.  He would sit on Hollister’s porch with a pipe sagging one corner of his mouth and gaze placidly at the river, the hills, the far stretch of the forest,—­and Hollister knew that to Bland it was so much water, so much up-piled rock and earth, so much growing wood.  He would say to Myra:  “My dear, it’s time we were going home”, or “I think I shall have a go at that big pool in Graveyard Creek to-morrow”, or “I say, Hollister, if this warm weather keeps on, the bears will be coming out soon, eh?”, and between whiles he would sit silently puffing at his pipe, a big, heavy, handsome man, wearing soiled overalls and a shabby coat with a curious dignity.  He spoke of “family” and “breeding” as if these were sacred possessions which conferred upon those who had them complete immunity from the sort of effort that common men must make.