He had reaffirmed the evidence of his eyes, and was no longer troubled by the vague fear that a disordered imagination had played him a disturbing trick.  He had looked on his wife’s face beyond a question.  He accepted this astounding fact as a man must accept the indubitable.  She was here in the flesh,—­this fair-haired, delicate-skinned woman whose arms and lips had once been his sure refuge.  Here, in a rude cabin on the brink of a frozen river, chance had set her neighbor to him.  To what end Hollister neither knew nor wished to inquire.  He said to himself that it did not matter.  He repeated this aloud.  He believed it to be true.  How could it matter now?

But he found that it did matter in a way that he had not reckoned upon.  For he found that he could not ignore her presence there.  He could not thrust her into the outer darkness beyond the luminous circle of his thoughts.  She haunted him with a troublesome insistence.  He had loved her.  She had loved him.  If that love had gone glimmering there still remained memory from which he could not escape, memories of caresses and embraces, of mutual passion, of all they had been to each other through a time when they desired only to be all things to each other.  These things arose like ghosts out of forgotten chambers in his mind.  He could not kill memory, and since he was a man, a physically perfect man, virile and unspent, memory tortured him.

He could not escape the consequences of being, the dominant impulses of life.  No normal man can.  He may think he can.  He may rest secure for a time in that belief,—­but it will fail him.  And of this Hollister now became aware.

He made every effort to shake off this new besetment, this fresh assault upon the tranquility he had attained.  But he could not abolish recollection.  He could not prevent his mind from dwelling upon this woman who had once meant so much to him, nor his flesh from responding to the stimulus of her nearness.  When a man is thirsty he must drink.  When he is hungry food alone can satisfy that hunger.  And there arose in Hollister that ancient sex-hunger from which no man may escape.

It had been dormant in him for a time; dormant but not dead.  In all his life Hollister had never gone about consciously looking upon women with a lustful eye.  But he understood life, its curious manifestations, its sensory demands, its needs.  For a long time pain, grief, suffering of body and anguish of mind had suppressed in him every fluttering of desire.  He had accepted that apparent snuffing out of passion thankfully.  Where, he had said to himself when he thought of this, where would he find such a woman as he could love who would find pleasure in the embrace of a marred thing like himself?  Ah, no.  He had seen them shrink too often from mere sight of his twisted face.  The fruits of love were not for the plucking of such as he.  Therefore he was glad that the urge of sex no longer troubled him.