He went on up to his own house.  The maple tree thrust one heavy-leaved branch over the porch.  The doors were shut.  All about the place hung that heavy mantle of stillness which wraps a foresaken home, a stillness in which not even a squirrel chattered or a blue-jay lifted his voice, and in which nothing moved.  He stood amid that silence, hearing only a faint whisper from the river, a far-off monotone from the falls beyond the chute.  He felt a heaviness in his breast, a sickening sense of being forsaken.

He went in, walked through the kitchen, looked into the bedroom, came back to the front room, opening doors and windows to let in the sun and air and drive out the faint, musty odor that gathers in a closed house.  A thin film of dust had settled on the piano, on chairs, on the table.  He stood in the middle of the room, abandoned to a horrible depression.  It was so still, so lonely, in there.  His mind, quick to form images, likened it to a crypt, a tomb in which all his hopes laid buried.  That was the effect it had on him, this deserted house.  His intelligence protested against submitting to this acceptance of disaster prior to the event, but his feelings overrode his intelligence.  If Doris had been lying white and still before him in her coffin, he could not have felt more completely that sense of the futility of life, of love, of hope, of everything.  As he stood there, one hand in his pocket, the other tracing with a forefinger an aimless pattern in the dust on the piano, he perceived with remarkable clarity that the unhappiness he had suffered, the loneliness he had endured before he met Doris Cleveland was nothing to what now threatened, to what now seemed to dog his footsteps with sinister portent.

In the bedroom occupied by their housekeeper stood the only mirror in the house.  Hollister went in there and stood before it, staring at the presentment of himself in the glass.  He turned away with a shiver.  He would not blame her if with clear vision she recoiled from that.  He could expect nothing else.  Or would she endure that frightful mien until she could first pity, then embrace?  Hollister threw out his hands in a swift gesture of uncertainty.  He could only wait and see, and meanwhile twist and turn upon the grid.  He could not be calm and detached and impersonal.  For him there was too much at stake.

He left all the doors and windows wide and climbed the hill.  If he were to withstand the onslaught of these uncertainties, these forebodings which pressed upon him with such damnable weight, he must bestir himself.  He must not sit down and brood.  He knew that.  It was not with any particular enthusiasm that he came upon his crew at work, that his eye marked the widening stump-dotted area where a year before the cedars stood branch to branch, nor when he looked over the long ricks of bolts waiting that swift plunge down the chute.