At the Beach Avenue entrance to the park she would release herself from the hand by which Hollister guided her through the throngs on the sidewalks or the traffic of the crossings, and along the open way she would keep step with him easily and surely, her cheeks glowing with the brisk movement; and she could tell him with uncanny exactness when they came abreast of the old elk paddock and the bowling greens, or the rock groynes and bathhouse at Second Beach.  She knew always when they turned the wide curve farther out, where through a fringe of maple and black alder there opened a clear view of all the Gulf, with steamers trailing their banners of smoke and the white pillar of Point Atkinson lighthouse standing guard at the troubled entrance to Howe Sound.

No, he could not easily fall into the masculine attitude of a protector, of guiding and bending a watchful care upon a helpless bit of desirable femininity that clung to him with confiding trust.  Doris Cleveland was too buoyantly healthy to be a clinging vine.  She had too hardy an intellectual outlook.  Her mind was like her body, vigorous, resilient, unafraid.  It was hard sometimes for Hollister to realize fully that to those gray eyes so often turned on him it was always night,—­or at best a blurred, unrelieved dusk.

In the old, comfortable days before the war, Hollister, like many other young men, accepted things pretty much as they came without troubling to scrutinize their import too closely.  It was easy for him, then, to overlook the faint shadows than ran before coming events.  It had been the most natural thing in the world to drift placidly until in more or less surprise he found himself caught fairly in a sweeping current.  Some of the most important turns in his life had caught him unprepared for their denouement, left him a trifle dizzy as he found himself committed irrevocably to this or that.

But he had not survived four years of bodily and spiritual disaster without an irreparable destruction of the sanguine, if more or less nebulous assurance that God was in his heaven and all was well with the world.  He had been stricken with a wariness concerning life, a reluctant distrust of much that in his old easy-going philosophy seemed solid as the hills.  He was disposed to a critical and sometimes pessimistic examination of his own feelings and of other people’s actions.

So love for Doris Cleveland did not steal upon him like a thief in the night.  From the hour when he put her in the taxi at the dock and went away with her address in his pocket, he was keenly alive to the definite quality of attraction peculiar to her.  When he was not thinking of her, he was thinking of himself in relation to her.  He found himself involved in the most intimate sort of speculation concerning her.  From the beginning he did not close his eyes to a possibility which might become a fact.  Six months earlier he would honestly have denied that any woman could linger so tenaciously in his mind, a lovely vision to gladden and disturb him in love’s paradoxical way.  Yet step by step he watched himself approaching that dubious state, dreading a little the drift toward a definite emotion, yet reluctant to draw back.