Looking up suddenly, his eyes met hers fixed unwaveringly upon him and for an instant his heart stood still with the reasonless conviction that she did know, she must know, that she could not escape knowing.  There was a quality of awareness in her steady gaze that terrified him for a moment by its implication, which made him feel as if he stood over a powder magazine and that she held the detonator in her hand.  But immediately he perceived the absurdity of his momentary panic.  Myra turned her head to speak to Doris.  She smiled, the old dimpling smile which gave him a strange feeling to see again.  Certainly his imagination was playing him tricks.  How could she know?  And what would she care if she did know,—­so long as he made no claims, so long as he let the dead past lie in its grave.  For Myra was as deeply concerned to have done with their old life as he.  He rested upon that assumption and went into the house and sat down to his supper.

Later, towards sundown, Myra went home.  Hollister watched her vanish among the thickets, thinking that she too had changed,—­as greatly as himself.  She had been timid once, reluctant to stay alone over night in a house with telephones and servants, on a street brilliantly lighted.  Now she could apparently face the loneliness of those solitudes without uneasiness.  But war and the aftermath of war had taught Hollister that man adapts himself to necessity when he must, and he suspected that women were not greatly different.  He understood that after all he had never really known Myra any more than she had known him.  Externally they had achieved knowledge of each other through sight, speech, physical contact, comprehension of each other’s habits.  But their real selves, the essence of their being, the shadowy inner self where motives and passions took form and gathered force until they were translated for good or evil into forthright action,—­these they had not known at all.

At any rate he perceived that Myra could calmly enough face the prospect of being alone.  Hollister cast his eye up to where the cedars towered, a green mass on the slope above the cliff.  He thought of Charlie Mills and wondered if after all she would be alone.

He felt ashamed of that thought as soon as it formed in his mind.  And being ashamed, he saw and understood that he still harbored a little bitterness against Myra.  He did not wish to bestow bitterness or any other emotion upon her.  He wanted her to remain completely outside the scope of his feelings.  He would have to try, he perceived, to cultivate a complete indifference to her, to what she did, to where she went, to insulate himself completely against her.  Because he was committed to other enterprises, and chiefly because, as he said to himself, he would not exchange a single brown strand of Doris Cleveland’s hair for all of Myra’s body, even if he had that choice.

The moon stole up from behind the Coast Range after they had gone to bed.  Its pale beams laid a silver square upon the dusky floor of their room.  Doris reached with one arm and drew his face close up to hers.