Whereupon the great men accepted their fees and departed.

So too did Hollister and his wife depart for the North again, where they took a furnished apartment overlooking the Gulf of Georgia, close to a beach where Robert junior could be wheeled in a pram by his nurse.  And Hollister settled himself to wait.

But it was weary work to nurse that sense of impending calamity, to find his brain ceaselessly active upon the forecast of a future in which he should walk alone, and while he was thus harassed still to keep up a false cheerfulness before Doris.  She was abnormally sensitive to impressions.  A tone spoke volumes to her.  He did not wish to disturb her by his own anxiety at this critical period.

All the while, little by little, her sight was coming She could distinguish now any violent contrast of colors.  The blurred detail of form grew less pronounced.  In the chaos of sensory impressions she began to distinguish order; and, when she began to peer unexpectedly at the people she met, at the chubby boy in his cot, at her husband’s face, Hollister could stand it no longer.  He was afraid, afraid of what he might see in those gray eyes if she looked at him too long, too closely.

He was doubly sensitive now about his face because of those weeks among strangers, of going about in crowded places where people stared at him with every degree of morbid curiosity, exhibiting every shade of feeling from a detached pity to open dislike of the spectacle he presented.  That alone weighed heavily on him.  Inaction rasped at his nerves.  The Toba and his house, the grim peaks standing aloof behind the timbered slopes, beckoned him back to their impassive, impersonal silences, those friendly silences in which a man could sit and think—­and hope.  A man doomed to death must prefer a swift end to a lingering one.  Hollister gradually came to the idea that he could not possibly sit by and watch the light of comprehension steal slowly into his wife’s eyes.  Better that she should fully regain her sight, and then see with what manner of man she had lived and to whom she had borne a son.  Then if she could look at him without recoiling, if the essential man meant more to her than the ghastly wreckage of his face, all would be well.  And if not,—­well, then, one devastating buffet from the mailed fist of destiny was better than the slow agony of daily watching the crisis approach.

So Hollister put forth the plausible fact that he must see about his affairs and took the next steamer for the Toba.

Lawanne, expecting letters, was at the float to meet the steamer.  Hollister went up-stream with him.  They talked very little until they reached Lawanne’s cabin.  There was a four-mile current to buck, and they saved their breath for the paddles.  Myra Bland waved as they passed, and Hollister scarcely looked up.  He was in the grip of a strange apathy.  He was tired, physically weary.  His body was dull and heavy, sluggish.  So was his mind.  He was aware of this, aware that a nervous reaction of some sort was upon him.  He wished that he could always be like that,—­dull, phlegmatic, uncaring.  To cease thinking, to have done with feeling, to be a clod, dead to desires, to high hopes and heart-numbing fears.