When Doris went about with him, frankly finding a pleasure in his company, he said to himself that it was a wholly unwise proceeding to set too great store by her.  Chance, he would reflect sadly, had swung them together, and that same blind chance would presently swing them far apart.  This daily intimacy of two beings, a little out of it among the medley of other beings so highly engrossed in their own affairs, would presently come to an end.  Sitting beside her on a shelving rock in the sun, Hollister would think of that and feel a pang.  He would say to himself also, a trifle cynically, that if she could see him as he was, perhaps she would be like the rest:  he would never have had the chance to know her, to sit beside her hearing the musical ripple of her voice when she laughed, seeing the sweetness of her face as she turned to him, smiling.  He wondered sometimes what she really thought of him, how she pictured him in her mind.  She had very clear mental pictures of everything she touched or felt, everything that came within the scope of her understanding,—­which covered no narrow field.  But Hollister never quite had the courage to ask her to describe what image of him she carried in her mind.

For a month he did very little but go about with Doris, or sit quietly reading a book in his room.  March drew to a close.  The southern border of Stanley Park which faced the Gulf over English Bay continued to be their haunt on every sunny afternoon, save once or twice when they walked along Marine Drive to where the sands of the Spanish Bank lay bared for a mile offshore at ebb tide.

If it rained, or a damp fog blew in from the sea, Hollister would pick out a motion-picture house that afforded a good orchestra, or get tickets to some available concert, or they would go and have tea at the Granada where there was always music at the tea hour in the afternoon.  Doris loved music.  Moreover she knew music, which is a thing apart from merely loving melodious sounds.  Once, at the place where she was living, the home of a married cousin, Hollister heard her play the piano for the first time.  He listened in astonishment, forgetting that a pianist does not need to see the keyboard and that the most intricate movements may be memorized.  But he did not visit that house often.  The people there looked at him a little askance.  They were courteous, but painfully self-conscious in his presence,—­and Hollister was still acutely sensitive about his face.

By the time that April Fool’s Day was a week old on the calendar, Hollister began to be haunted by a gloomy void which would engulf him soon, for Doris told him one evening that in another week she was going back to the Euclataws.  She had already stretched her visit to greater length than she intended.  She must go back.

They were sitting on a bench under a great fir that overlooked a deserted playground, emerald green with new grass.  They faced a sinking sun, a ball of molten fire on the far crest of Vancouver Island.  Behind them the roar of traffic on downtown streets was like the faint murmur of distant surf.