“I’ve warned you,” she said with mock solemnity.  “Your blood be upon your own head.”

They both laughed.

CHAPTER X

“Why not go in there and take that cedar out yourself?” Doris suggested.

They had been talking about that timber limit in the Toba, the possibility of getting a few thousand dollars out of it, and how they could make the money serve them best.

“We could live there.  I’d love to live there.  I loved that valley.  I can see it now, every turn of the river, every canyon, and all the peaks above.  It would be like getting back home.”

“It is a beautiful place,” Hollister agreed.  He had a momentary vision of the Toba as he saw it last:  a white-floored lane between two great mountain ranges; green, timbered slopes that ran up to immense declivities; glaciers; cold, majestic peaks scarred by winter avalanches.  He had come a little under the spell of those rugged solitudes then.  He could imagine it transformed by the magic of summer.  He could imagine himself living there with this beloved woman, exacting a livelihood from those hushed forests and finding it good.

“I’ve been wondering about that myself,” he said.  “There is a lot of good cedar there.  That bolt chute your brothers built could be repaired.  If they expected to get that stuff out profitably, why shouldn’t I?  I’ll have to look into that.”

They were living in a furnished flat.  If they had married in what people accustomed to a certain formality of living might call haste they had no thought of repenting at leisure, or otherwise.  They were, in fact, quite happy and contented.  Marriage had shattered no illusions.  If, indeed, they cherished any illusory conceptions of each other, the intimacy of mating had merely served to confirm those illusions, to shape them into realities.  They were young enough to be ardent lovers, old enough to know that love was not the culmination, but only an ecstatic phase in the working out of an inexorable natural law.

If Doris was happy, full of high spirits, joyfully abandoned to the fulfilment of her destiny as a woman, Hollister too was happier than he had considered it possible for him ever to be again.  But, in addition, he was supremely grateful.  Life for him as an individual had seemed to be pretty much a blank wall, a drab, colorless routine of existence; something he could not voluntarily give up, but which gave nothing, promised nothing, save monotony and isolation and, in the end, complete despair.  So that his love for this girl, who had given herself to him with the strangely combined passion of a mature woman and the trusting confidence of a child, was touched with gratitude.  She had put out her hand and lifted him from the pit.  She would always be near him, a prop and a stay.  Sometimes it seemed to Hollister a miracle.  He would look at his face in the mirror and thank God that she was blind.  Doris said that made no difference, but he knew better.  It made a difference to eyes that could see, however tolerantly.