“I wonder if it is such a desperate chance?” she said slowly.  “If it is, why do you want to take it?”

“Because the alternative is worse than the most desperate chance I could imagine,” he answered.  “And because I have a longing to face life with you, and a dread of it alone.  You can’t see my ugly face which frightens off other people, so it doesn’t mean anything to you.  But you can hear my voice.  You can feel me near you.  Does it mean anything to you?  Do you wish I could always be near you?”

He drew her up close to him.  She permitted it, unresisting, that strange, thoughtful look still on her face.

“Tell me, do you want me to love you—­or don’t you care?” he demanded.

For a moment Doris made no answer.

“You’re a man,” she said then, very softly, a little breathlessly.  “And I’m a woman.  I’m blind—­but I’m a woman.  I’ve been wondering how long it would take you to find that out.”

CHAPTER IX

Not until Hollister had left Doris at her cousin’s home and was walking back downtown did a complete realization of what he had done and pledged himself to do burst upon him.  When it did, he pulled up short in his stride, as if he had come physically against some forthright obstruction.  For an instant he felt dazed.  Then a consuming anger flared in him,—­anger against the past by which he was still shackled.

But he refused to be bound by those old chains whose ghostly clanking arose to harass him in this hour when life seemed to be holding out a new promise, when he saw happiness beckoning, when he was dreaming of pleasant things.  He leaned over the rail on the Granville Street drawbridge watching a tug pass through, seeing the dusky shape of the small vessel, hearing the ripple of the flood tide against the stone piers, and scarcely conscious of the bridge or the ship or the gray dimness of the sea, so profound was the concentration of his mind on this problem.  It did not perplex him; it maddened him.  He whispered a defiant protest to himself and walked on.  He was able to think more calmly when he reached his room.  There were the facts, the simple, undeniable facts, to be faced without shrinking,—­and a decision to be made.

For months Hollister, when he thought of the past, thought of it as a slate which had been wiped clean.  He was dead, officially dead.  His few distant relatives had accepted the official report without question.  Myra had accepted it, acted upon it.  Outside the British War Office no one knew, no one dreamed, that he was alive.  He had served in the Imperials.  He recalled the difficulties and delays of getting his identity reestablished in the coldly impersonal, maddeningly deliberate, official departments which dealt with his case.  He had succeeded.  His back pay had been granted.  A gratuity was still forthcoming.  But Hollister knew that the record of his case was entangled with