When he came back at last to the house, Myra was there, busy at her self-imposed tasks in those neglected rooms.  Hollister sat down on the porch steps.  He felt a little uneasy about her being there, uneasy for her.  In nearly two weeks of fighting fire he had been thrown in intimate daily contact with Jim Bland, and his appraisal of Bland’s character was less and less flattering the more he revised his estimate of the man.  He felt that Myra was inviting upon herself something she might possibly not suspect.  He decided to tell her it would be wiser to keep away; but when he did so, she merely laughed.  There was a defiant recklessness in her tone when she said: 

“Do you think I need a chaperone?  Must one, even in this desolate place, kow-tow to the conventions devised to prop up the weak and untrustworthy?  If Jim can’t trust me, I may as well learn it now as any other time.  Besides, it doesn’t matter to me greatly whether he does or not.  If for any reason he should begin to think evil of me—­well, the filthy thought in another’s mind can’t defile me.  I can’t recall that I was ever greatly afraid of what other people might think of me, so long I was sure of myself.”

“Nevertheless,” Hollister said, “it is as well for you not to come here alone while I am here alone.”

“Don’t you like me to come, Robin?” she asked.

“No,” he said slowly.  “That wasn’t why I spoke—­but I don’t think I do.”

“Why?” she persisted.

Hollister stirred uneasily.

“Call a spade a spade, Robin,” she advised.  “Say what you think—­what you mean.”

“That’s difficult,” he muttered.  “How can any one say what he means when he is not quite sure what he does mean?  I’m in trouble.  You’re sorry for me, in a way.  And maybe you feel—­because of old times, because of the contrast between what your life was then and what it is now—­you feel as if you would like to comfort me.  And I don’t want you to feel that way.  I look at you—­and I think about what you said.  I wonder if you meant it?  Do you remember what you said?”

“Quite clearly.  I meant it, Robin.  I still mean it.  I’m yours—­if you need me.  Perhaps you won’t.  Perhaps you will.  Does it trouble you to have me a self-appointed anchor to windward?”

She clasped her hands over her knees, bending forward a little, looking at him with a curious serenity.  Her eyes did not waver from his.

Hollister made no answer.

“I brought a lot of this on you, Robin,” she went on in the musical, rippling voice so like Doris in certain tones and inflections as to make him wonder idly if he had unconsciously fallen in love with Doris Cleveland’s voice because it was like Myra’s.  “If I had stuck it out in London till you came back, maimed or otherwise, things would have been different.  But we were started off, flung off, one might say, into different orbits by the forces of the war itself.  That’s