Now it seemed that he had mysteriously acquired a starting point and a goal.  He was aware of a new impetus.  And since life had swept away a great many illusions which he had once cherished as proven reality, he did not shrink from or misunderstand the cause underlying this potent change in his outlook.  He pondered on this.  He wished to be sure.  And he did not have to strain himself intellectually to understand that Doris Cleveland was the outstanding factor in this change.

Each time he met her, he breathed a prayer of thanks for her blindness, which permitted her to accept him as a man instead of shrinking from him as a monster.  Just as the man secure in the knowledge that he possesses the comfort and security of a home can endure with fortitude the perils and hardships of a bitter trial, so Hollister could walk the streets of Vancouver now, indifferent to the averted eyes, the quick glance of reluctant pity.  He could get through the days without brooding.  Loneliness no longer made him shudder with its clammy touch.

For that he could thank Doris Cleveland, and her alone.  He saw her nearly every day.  She was the straw to which he, drowning, clung with all his might.  The most depressing hours that overtook him were those in which he visualized her floating away beyond his reach.

To Hollister, as he saw more of her, she seemed the most remarkable woman he had ever known.  Her loss of sight had been more than compensated by an extraordinary acuteness of mental vision.  The world about her might now be one of darkness, but she had a precise comprehension of its nature, its manifestations, its complexities.  He had always taken blindness as a synonym for helplessness, a matter of uncertain groping, of timidities, of despair.  He revised that conclusion sharply in her case.  He could not associate the most remote degree of helplessness with Doris Cleveland when they walked, for instance, through Stanley Park from English Bay to Second Beach.  That broad path, with the Gulf swell muttering along the bouldery shore on one side and the wind whispering in the lofty branches of tall trees on the other, was a favorite haunt of theirs on crisp March days.  The buds of the pussy willow were beginning to burst.  Birds twittered in dusky thickets.  Even the gulls, wheeling and darting along the shore, had a new note in their raucous crying.  None of these first undertones of the spring symphony went unmarked by Doris Cleveland.  She could hear and feel.  She could respond to subtle, external stimuli.  She could interpret her thoughts and feelings with apt phrases, with a whimsical humor,—­sometimes with an appealing touch of wistfulness.