“Come back to the house,” Doris said at last.  “Baby’s fretting a little.  The trip in a small boat rather upset him.  I don’t like to leave him too long.”

But Robert junior was peacefully asleep in his crib when they reached the house.  After a look at him, they went out and sat on the porch steps.  There, when the trend of their conversation made it unavoidable, he told her what had overtaken Charlie Mills and Myra Bland.

Doris listened silently.  She sighed.

“What a pity,” she murmured.  “The uselessness of it, the madness—­like a child destroying his toys in a blind rage.  Poor Myra.  She told me once that life seemed to her like swimming among whirlpools.  It must have been true.”

How true it was Hollister did not dare reveal.  That was finished, for Myra and himself.  She had perished among the whirlpools.  He scarcely knew how he had escaped.

“How lucky we are, you and I, Bob,” Doris said after a time.  She put her arms around him impulsively.  “We might so easily be wandering about alone in a world that is terribly harsh to the unfortunate.  Instead—­we’re here together, and life means something worth while to us.  It does to me, I know.  Does it to you?”

“As long as I have you, it does,” he answered truthfully.  “But if you could see me as I really am, perhaps I might not have you very long.”

“How absurd,” she declared—­and then, a little thoughtfully, “if I thought that was really true, I should never wish to see again.  Curiously, the last two or three weeks this queer, blurred sort of vision I have seems quite sufficient.  I haven’t wanted to see half so badly as I’ve wanted you.  I can get impressions enough through the other four senses.  I’d hate awfully to have to get along without you.  You’ve become almost a part of me—­I wonder if you understand that?”

Hollister did understand.  It was mutual,—­that want, that dependence, that sense of incompleteness which each felt without the other.  It was a blessed thing to have, something to be cherished, and he knew how desperately he had reacted to everything that threatened its loss.

Hollister sat there looking up at the far places, the high, white mountain crests, the deep gorges, the paths that the winter slides had cut through the green forest, down which silvery cataracts poured now.  It seemed to have undergone some subtle change, to have become less aloof, to have enveloped itself in a new and kindlier atmosphere.  Yet he knew it was as it had always been.  The difference was in himself.  The sympathetic response to that wild beauty was purely subjective.  He could look at the far snows, the bluish gleam of the glaciers, the restful green of the valley floor, with a new quality of appreciation.  He could even—­so resilient and adaptable a thing is the human mind—­see himself engaged upon material enterprises, years passing, his boy growing up, life assuming a fullness, a proportion, an orderly progression that two hours earlier would have seemed to him only a futile dream.