There was no falsity in his love, in his aching desire to lay hold of happiness out of the muddle of his life, to bestow happiness if he could upon a woman who like himself had suffered misfortune.  Within him there was the instinct to clutch firmly this chance which lay at hand.  For Hollister the question was not, “Is this thing right or wrong in the eyes of the world?” but “Is it right for her and for me?” And always he got the one answer, the answer with which lovers have justified themselves ever since love became something more than the mere breeding instinct of animals.

Hollister could not see himself as a man guilty of moral obliquity if he let the graveyard of the past retain its unseemly corpse without legal exhumation and examination, and the delivering of a formal verdict upon what was already an accomplished fact.

Nevertheless, he forced himself to consider just what it would mean to take that step.  Briefly it would be necessary for him to go to London, to secure documentary evidence.  Then he must return to Canada, enter suit against Myra, secure service upon her here in British Columbia.  There would be a trial and a temporary decree; after the lapse of twelve months a divorce absolute.

He was up against a stone wall.  Even if he nerved himself to public rattling of the skeleton in his private life, he did not have the means.  That was final.  He did not have money for such an undertaking, even if he beggared himself.  That was a material factor as inexorable as death.  Actual freedom he had in full measure.  Legal freedom could only be purchased at a price,—­and he did not have the price.

Perhaps that decided Hollister.  Perhaps he would have made that decision in any case.  He had no friends to be shocked.  He had no reputation to be smirched.  He was, he had said with a bitter wistfulness, a stray dog.  And Doris Cleveland was in very much the same position.  Two unfortunates cleaving to each other, moved by a genuine human passion.  If they could be happy together, they had a right to be together.  Hollister challenged his reason to refute that cry of his heart.

He disposed finally of the last uncertainty,—­whether he should tell Doris.  And a negative to that rose instantly to his lips.  The past was a dead past.  Let it remain dead—­buried.  Its ghost would never rise to trouble them.  Of that he was very sure.

Hollister went to bed, but not to sleep.  He heard a great clock somewhere in the town strike twelve and then one, while he still lay staring up at the dusky ceiling.  But his thoughts had taken a pleasanter road.  He had turned over the pages of his life history, scanned them with a gloomy and critical eye, and cast them with decisive finality into the waste basket.  He was about to begin a new book, the book of the future.  It was pleasant to contemplate what he and Doris Cleveland together would write on those blank pages.  To hope much, to be no longer downcast, to be able to look forward with eagerness.  There was a glow in that like good wine.