That they had lived together sixteen months did not count.  That she had borne him a child,—­neither did that count.  That she had pillowed her brown head nightly in the crook of his arm—­that he had bestowed a thousand kisses on her lips, her hair, her neck—­that she had lain beside him hour after hour through the long nights, drowsily content—­none of these intimacies counted beside vision.  He was a stranger in the dark.  She did not know him.  She heard his voice, knew his tenderness, felt the touch of him,—­the unseen lover.  But there remained for her the revelation of sight.  He was still the mysterious, the unknown, about which her fancies played.

How could he know what image of him, what ideal, resided tenaciously in her mind, and whether it would survive the shock of reality?  That was the root of Hollister’s fear, a definite well-grounded fear.  He found himself hoping that promise of sight would never be fulfilled, that the veil would not be lifted, that they would go on as they were.  And he would feel ashamed of such a thought.  Sight was precious.  Who was he to deny her that mercy,—­she who loved the sun and the hills and the sea; all the sights of earth and sky which had been shut away so long; she who had crept into his arms many a time, weeping passionate tears because all the things she loved were forever wrapped in darkness?

If upon Hollister had been bestowed the power to grant her sight or to withhold it, he would have shrunk from a decision.  Because he loved her he wished her to see, to experience the joy of dawn following that long night in which she groped her way.  But he dreaded lest that light gladdening her eyes should mean darkness for him, a darkness in which everything he valued would be lost.

Then some voice within him whispered suggestively that in this darkness Myra would be waiting with outstretched hands,—­and Hollister frowned and tried not to think of that.

CHAPTER XIX

At noon next day Hollister left the mess-house table and went out to sit in the sun and smoke a pipe beyond the Rabelaisian gabble of his crew.  While he sat looking at the peaks north of the valley, from which the June sun was fast stripping even the higher snows, he saw a man bent under a shoulder pack coming up the slope that dropped away westward toward the Toba’s mouth.  He came walking by stumps and through thickets until he was near the camp.  Then Hollister recognized him as Charlie Mills.  He saw Hollister, came over to where he sat, and throwing off his pack made a seat of it, wiping away the sweat that stood in shining drops on his face.

“Well, I’m back, like the cat that couldn’t stay away,” Mills said.

The same queer undercurrent of melancholy, of sadness, the same hint of pain colored his words,—­a subtle matter of inflection, of tone.  The shadowy expression of some inner conflict hovered in his dark eyes.  Again Hollister felt that indefinable urge of sympathy for this man who seemed to suffer with teeth grimly clenched, so that no complaint ever escaped him.  A strange man, tenacious of his black moods.