Myra accompanied him to England, deferred their separation to the last hour.  They could well afford that concession to their affection, they told each other.  It was so hard to part.

It scarcely seemed possible that four years had gone winging by since then, yet in certain moods it seemed to Hollister as if an eternity had passed.  Things had been thus and so; they had become different by agonizing processes.

He did not know where Myra was.  He, himself, was here in Vancouver, alone, a stranger, a single speck of human wreckage cast on a far beach by the receding tides of war.  He had no funds worth considering, but money was not as yet an item of consideration.  He was not disabled.  Physically he was more fit than he had ever been.  The delicate mechanism of his brain was unimpaired.  He had no bitterness—­no illusions.  His intellect was acute enough to suggest that in the complete shucking off of illusions lay his greatest peril.  Life, as it faced him, the individual, appeared to be almost too grim a business to be endured without hopes and dreams.  He had neither.  He had nothing but moods.

He walked slowly down Granville Street in the blackest mood which had yet come upon him.  It differed from that strange feeling of terror which had taken him unaware the night before.  He had fallen easy prey then to the black shadows of forlornness.  He was still as acutely aware of the barrier which his disfigurement raised between him and other men.  But with that morbid awareness there rose also now, for the first time, resentment against the smug folk who glanced at him and hurriedly averted their eyes.  Slowly, by imperceptible degrees, as the tide rises on a sloping shore, his anger rose.

The day was cold and sunny, a January morning with a touch of frost in the air.  Men passed him, walking rapidly, clad in greatcoats.  Women tripped by, wrapped in furs, eyes bright, cheeks glowing.  And as they passed, singly, in chattering pairs, in smiling groups, Hollister observed them with a growing fury.  They were so thoroughly insulated against everything disagreeable.  All of them.  A great war had just come to a dramatic close, a war in which staggering numbers of men had been sacrificed, body and soul, to enable these people to walk the streets in comfortable security.  They seemed so completely unaware of the significance of his disfigured face.  It was simply a disagreeable spectacle from which they turned with brief annoyance.

Most of these men and women honored the flag.  In a theater, at any public gathering, a display of the national colors caused the men to bare reverently their heads, the women to clap their hands with decorous enthusiasm.  Without doubt they were all agreed that it was a sacred duty to fight for one’s country.  How peculiar and illogical then, he reflected, to be horrified at the visible results of fighting for one’s country, of saving the world for democracy.  The thing had had to be done.