And if so—­then why?

Hollister’s reason projected him swiftly and surely out of pained and useless speculation into forthright doing.  From surety of what he had seen he passed to doubt, to uneasiness about himself:  for if he could not look at a fair-haired woman without seeing Myra’s face, then he must be going mad.  He must know, beyond any equivocation.

There was a simple way to know, and that way Hollister took while the embers of his noonday fire still glowed red on the hearth.  He took his glasses and went down to the valley floor.

It would have been a simple matter and the essence of directness to walk boldly up and rap at the door.  Certainly he would not be recognized.  He could account for himself as a traveler in need of matches, some trifling thing to be borrowed.  The wilderness is a destroyer of conventions.  The passer-by needs to observe no ceremony.  He comes from nowhere and passes into the unknown, unquestioned as to his name, his purpose, or his destination.  That is the way of all frontiers.

But Hollister wished to see without being seen.  He did not know why.  He did not attempt to fathom his reluctance for open approach.  In the social isolation which his disfigurement had inflicted upon him, Hollister had become as much guided by instinct in his actions and impulses as by any coldly reasoned process.  He was moved to his stealthy approach now by an instinct which he obeyed as blindly as the crawling worm.

He drew up within fifty yards of the house, moving furtively through thickets that screened him, and took up his post beside a stump.  He peered through the drooping boughs of a clump of young cedar.  There, in perfect concealment, hidden as the deer hides to let a roving hunter pass, Hollister watched with a patience which was proof against cold, against the discomfort of snow that rose to his thighs.

For an hour he waited.  Except for the wavering smoke from the stovepipe, the place might have been deserted.  The house was one with the pervading hush of the valley.  Hollister grew numb.  But he held his post.  And at last the door opened and the woman stood framed in the opening.

She poised for an instant on the threshold, looking across the river.  Her gaze pivoted slowly until it encompassed the arc of a half-circle, so that she faced Hollister squarely.  He had the binoculars focused on her face.  It seemed near enough to touch.  Then she took a step or two gingerly in the snow, and stooping, picked up a few sticks from a pile of split wood.  The door closed upon her once more.

Hollister turned upon the instant, retraced his steps across the flat, gained the foot of the steep hill and climbed step by step with prodigious effort in the deep snow until he reached the cabin.