He stood still for a few seconds.  In the living quarters of his house there was, by deliberate intention, no mirror.  Among Hollister’s things there was a small hand glass before which he shaved off the hairs that grew out of the few patches of unscarred flesh about his chin, those fragments of his beard which sprouted in grotesquely separated tufts.  But in the bedroom they had arranged for the housekeeper there was a large oval glass above a dresser.  Into this room Hollister now walked and stood before the mirror staring at his face.

No, he could not blame her, any one, for shrinking from that.  And when the darting shuttle of his thought reminded him that Myra did not shrink from it, he went out to the front room and with his body sunk deep in a leather chair he fell to pondering on this.  But it led him nowhere except perhaps to a shade of disbelief in Myra and her motives, a strange instinctive distrust both of her and himself.

He recognized Myra’s power.  He had succumbed to it in the old careless days and gloried in his surrender.  He perceived that her compelling charm was still able to move him as it did other men.  He knew that Myra had been carried this way and that in the great, cruel, indifferent swirl that was life.  He could understand a great many things about her and about himself, about men as men and women as women, that he would have denied in the days before the war.

But while he could think about himself and Myra Bland with a calmness that approached indifference, he could not think with that same detachment about Doris.  She had come, walking fearlessly in her darkened world, to him in his darkened world of discouragement and bitterness.  There was something fine and true in this blind girl, something that Hollister valued over and above the flesh-and-blood loveliness of her, something rare and precious that he longed to keep.  He could not define it; he simply knew that it resided in her, that it was a precious quality that set her apart in his eyes from all other women.

But would it stand the test of sight?  If he were as other men he would not have been afraid; he would scarcely have asked himself that question.  But he knew he would be like a stranger to her, a strange man with a repellingly scarred face.  He did not believe she could endure that, she who loved beauty so, who was sensitive to subtleties of tone and atmosphere beyond any woman he had ever known.  Hollister tried to put himself in her place.  Would he have taken her to his arms as gladly, as joyously, if she had come to him with a face twisted out of all semblance to its natural lines?  And Hollister could not say.  He did not know.

He threw up his head at last, in a desperate sort of resolution.  In a week he would know.  Meantime—­

He had no work to occupy him now.  There were a few bolts behind the boom-sticks which he would raft to the mill at his leisure.  He walked up to the chute mouth now and looked about.  A few hundred yards up the hill the line of green timber ended against the black ruin of the fire.  There the chute ended also.  Hollister walked on across the rocky point, passed the waterfall that was shrinking under the summer heat, up to a low cliff where he sat for a long time looking down on the river.