And while he stared a woman stepped out of the doorway and stood looking, turning her head slowly until at last she gazed steadily up over the cliff-brow as if she might be looking at Hollister himself.  He sat on his haunches in the snow, his elbows braced on his knees, and trained the powerful lenses upon her.  In a matter of half a minute her gaze shifted, turned back to the river.  She shrugged her shoulders, or perhaps it was a shiver born of the cold, and then went back inside.

Hollister rested the binoculars upon his knee.  His face did not alter.  Facile expression was impossible to that marred visage.  Pain or anger or sorrow could no longer write its message there for the casual beholder to read.  The thin, twisted remnants of his lips could tighten a little, and that was all.

But his eyes, which had miraculously escaped injury, could still glow with the old fire, or grow dull and lifeless, giving some index to the mutations of his mind.  And those darkly blue eyes, undimmed beacons amid the wreckage of his features, burned and gleamed now with a strange fire.

The woman who had been standing there staring up the hillside, with the sun playing hide and seek in her yellow hair, was Myra Hollister, his wife.

CHAPTER VI

Hollister sat in the snow, his gaze fixed upon this house on the river bank, wrestling with all the implications of this incredible discovery.  He could neither believe what he had seen nor deny the evidence of his vision.  He kept watch, with the glasses ready to fix upon the woman if she emerged again.  But she did not reappear.  The cold began to chill his body, to stiffen his limbs.  He rose at last and made his way along the cliff, keeping always a close watch on the house below until he came abreast of his own quarters and turned reluctantly into the hollow where the cedars masked the log cabin.

He cooked a meal and ate his food in a mechanical sort of abstraction, troubled beyond measure, rousing himself out of periods of concentration in which there seemed, curiously, to be two of him present,—­one questioning and wondering, the other putting forward critical and sneering answers, pointing out the folly of his wonder.

In the end he began to entertain a real doubt not only of the correctness of his sight, but also of his sanity.  For it was clearly impossible, his reason insisted, that Myra would be pioneering in those snowy solitudes, that she should live in a rude shack among stumps on the fringe of a wilderness.  She had been a creature of luxury.  Hollister could not conceive a necessity for her doing this.  He had so arranged his affairs when he went to France that she had access to and complete control of his fortune.  When she disclosed to him by letter the curious transformation of her affections, he had not revoked that arrangement.  In the bewildering shock of that disclosure his first thought had not been a concern for his property.  And the official report of him as killed in action which followed so soon after had allowed her to reap the full benefit of this situation.  When she left London, if indeed she had left London, with her new associate in the field of emotion she had at least forty-five thousand dollars in negotiable securities.