He forgot Myra’s presence.  Six months earlier he would have resented her being there, he would have been uneasy.  Now it made no difference.  He had ceased to think of Myra as a possible menace.  Lately he had not thought of her or her affairs at all.

She came now and sat down upon the porch step within arm’s length of him, looking at him in thoughtful silence.

“Is it such a tragedy, after all?” she said at last.

“Is what?”

He took refuge in refusal to understand, although he understood instantly what Myra meant.  But he shrank from her intuitive penetration of his troubled spirit.  Like any other wounded animal, he wanted to be left alone.

“You know what I mean,” she said.  “You are afraid of Doris seeing you.  That’s plain enough.  Is it so terrible a thing, after all?  If she can’t stand the sight of your face, you’re better off without her.”

“It’s easy to be philosophic about some one else’s troubles,” Hollister muttered.  “You can be off with one love and be reasonably sure of another before long.  I can’t.  I’m not made that way, I don’t think.  And if I were, I’m too badly handicapped.”

“You haven’t a very charitable opinion of me, have you, Robin?” she said reflectively.  “You rather despise me for doing precisely what you yourself have done, making a bid for happiness as chance offered.  Only I haven’t found it, and you have.  So you are morally superior, and your tragedy must naturally be profound because your happiness seems threatened.”

“Oh, damn the moral considerations,” he said wearily.  “It isn’t that.  I don’t blame you for anything you ever did.  Why should I?  I’m a bigamist.  I’m the father of an illegitimate son.  According to the current acceptance of morality, I’ve contaminated and disgraced an innocent woman.  Yet I’ve never been and am not now conscious of any regrets.  I don’t feel ashamed.  I don’t feel that I have sinned.  I merely grasped the only chance, the only possible chance that was in reach.  That’s all you did.  As far as you and I are concerned, there isn’t any question of blame.”

“Are you sure,” she asked point-blank, “that your face will make any difference to Doris?”

“How can it help?” he replied gloomily.  “If you had your eyes shut and were holding in your hands what you thought was a pretty bird and suddenly opened your eyes and saw it was a toad, wouldn’t you recoil?”

“Your simile is no good.  If Doris really loved you, it was not because she pictured you as a pretty bird.  If she could love you without seeing you, if you appealed to her, why should your marred face make her turn away from you?”

But Hollister could not explain his feeling, his deep dread of that which seemed no remote possibility but something inevitable and very near at hand.  He did not want pity.  He did not want to be merely endured.  He sat silent, thinking of those things, inwardly protesting against this miraculous recovery of sight which meant so great a boon to his wife and contained such fearful possibilities of misery for himself.