The steamer cleared the Redondas, stood down through Desolation Sound and turned her blunt nose into the lower gulf just as dark came on.  Hollister and Doris Cleveland sat in the cabin talking.  They went to dinner together, and if there were curious looks bestowed upon them Hollister was too engrossed to care and the girl, of course, could not see those sidelong, unspoken inquiries.  After dinner they found chairs in the same deck saloon and continued their conversation until ten o’clock, when drowsiness born of a slow, rolling motion of the vessel drove them to their berths.

The drowsiness abandoned Hollister as soon as he turned in.  He lay wakeful, thinking about Doris Cleveland.  He envied her courage and fortitude, the calm assurance with which she seemed to face the world which was all about her and yet hidden from her sight.  She was really an extraordinary young woman, he decided.

She was traveling alone.  For several months she had been living with old friends of the family on Stuart Island, close by the roaring tiderace of the Euclataw Rapids.  She was returning there, she told Hollister, after three weeks or so in Vancouver.  The steamer would dock about daylight the following morning.  When Hollister offered to see her ashore and to her destination, she accepted without any reservations.  It comforted Hollister’s sadly bruised ego to observe that she even seemed a trifle pleased.

“I have once or twice got a steward to get me ashore and put me in a taxi,” she said.  “But if you don’t mind, Mr. Hollister.”

And Hollister most decidedly did not mind.  Doris Cleveland had shot like a pleasant burst of colorful light across the grayest period of his existence, and he was loath to let her go.

He dropped off to sleep at last, to dream, strangely enough and with astonishing vividness, of the cabin among the great cedars with the snow banked white outside the door.  He saw himself sitting beside the fireplace poring over one of Doris Cleveland’s books.  And he was no longer lonely, because he was not alone.

He smiled at himself, remembering this fantasy of the subconscious mind, when the steward’s rap at the door wakened him half an hour before the steamer docked.

CHAPTER VIII

Quartered once more in the city he had abandoned two months earlier, Hollister found himself in the grip of new desires, stirred by new plans, his mind yielding slowly to the conviction that life was less barren than it seemed.  Or was that, he asked himself doubtfully, just another illusion which would uphold him for awhile and then perish?  Not so many weeks since, a matter of days almost, life, so far as he was concerned, held nothing, promised nothing.  All the future years through which he must live because of the virility of his body seemed nothing but a dismal fog in which he must wander without knowing where he went or what lay before him.