“Are you happy?” she demanded with a fierce intensity.  “Don’t you ever wish you had a wife who could see?  Aren’t you ever sorry?”

“Doris, Doris,” he chided gently.  “What in the world put such a notion as that into your head?”

She lay thoughtful for a minute.

“Sometimes I wonder,” she said at last.  “Sometimes I feel that I must reassure myself that you are contented with me.  When we come in contact with a woman like Mrs. Bland, for instance—­Tell me, Bob, is she pretty?”

“Yes,” he said “Very.”

“Fair or dark?”

“Fair-skinned.  She has blond hair and dark blue eyes, almost purple.  She is about your height, about the same figure.  Why so curious?”

“I just wondered.  I like her very much,” Doris said, with some slight emphasis on the last two words.  “She is a very interesting talker.”

“I noticed that,” Hollister observed dryly.  “She spoke charmingly of the weather and the local scenery and the mosquitoes.”

Doris laughed.

“A woman always falls back on those conversational staples with a strange man.  That’s just the preliminary skirmishing.  But she was here all afternoon, and we didn’t spend five hours talking about the weather.”

“What did you talk about then?” Hollister asked curiously.

“Men and women and money mostly,” Doris replied.  “If one may judge a woman by the impressionistic method, I should say that Mrs. Bland would be very attractive to men.”

It was on the tip of Hollister’s tongue to say, “She is.”  Instead he murmured, “Is that why you were doubting me?  Think I’m apt to fall in love with this charming lady?”

“No,” Doris said thoughtfully.  “It wasn’t anything concrete like that.  It’s a feeling, a mood, I suppose.  And it’s silly for me to say things like that.  If you grow sorry you married me, if you fall in love with another woman, I’ll know it without being told.”

She pinched his cheek playfully and lay silent beside him.  Hollister watched the slow shift of the moonbeams across the foot of the bed, thinking, his mind darting sketchily from incident to incident of the past, peering curiously into the misty future, until at last he grew aware by her drooped eyelashes and regular breathing that Doris was asleep.

He grew drowsy himself.  His eyelids grew heavy.  Presently he was asleep also and dreaming of a fantastic struggle in which Myra Bland—­transformed into a vulture-like creature with a fierce beaked face and enormous strength—­tore him relentlessly from the arms of his wife.

CHAPTER XIII