Bill Hayes gave a terse account of his stewardship during Hollister’s absence.  So many cords of bolts cut and boomed and delivered to the mill.  Hollister’s profits were accelerating, the fruit of an insatiable market, of inflated prices.  As he trudged down the hill, he reflected upon that.  He was glad in a way.  If Doris could not or would not live with him, he could make life easy for her and the boy.  Money would do that for them.  With a strange perverseness, his mind dwelt upon the most complete breaking up of his domestic life.  It persisted in shadowing forth scenes in which he and Doris took part, in which it was made plain how and why they could no longer live together.  In Hollister’s mind these scenes always ended by his crying despairingly “If you can’t, why, you can’t, I suppose.  I don’t blame you.”  And he would give her the bigger half of his funds and go his way.  He would not blame her for feeling like that.  Nevertheless, Hollister had moments when he felt that he would hate her if she did,—­a paradox he could not understand.

He slept—­or at least tried to sleep—­that night alone in his house.  He cooked his breakfast and worked on the boom until midday, then climbed the hill to the camp and ate lunch with his men.  He worked up there till evening and came down in the dusk.  He dreaded that lonely house, those deserted rooms.  But he forced himself to abide there.  He had a dim idea of so disciplining his feelings, of attaining a numbed acquiescence in what he could not help.

Some one had been in the house.  The breakfast dishes were washed, the dust cleared away, the floor swept, his bed made.  He wondered, but gave credit to Lawanne.  It was like Archie to send his Chinese boy to perform those tasks.

But it was Myra, he discovered by and by.  He came off the hill in mid-afternoon two days later and found her clearing up the kitchen.

“You don’t mind, do you?” she asked.  “I have nothing much to do at home, and it seems a shame for everything here to be neglected.  When is Doris coming back?”

“I don’t know exactly.  Perhaps two or three weeks, perhaps as many months.”

“But her eyes will be all right again?”

“So they say.”

Hollister went out and sat on the front doorstep.  His mind sought to span the distance to Vancouver.  He wondered what Doris was doing.  He could see her sitting in a shaded room.  He could see young Robert waving fat arms out of the cushioned depths of his carriage.  He could see the sun glittering on the sea that spread away westward, from beneath the windows of the house where they lived.  And Doris would sit there anticipating the sight of all those things which had been hidden in a three-year night,—­the sea rippling in the sun, the distant purple hills, the nearer green of the forest and of grass and flowers, all the light and color that made the world beautiful.  She would be looking forward to seeing him.  And that was the stroke which Hollister dreaded, which made him indifferent to other things.