In this wilderness, this vast region of forest and streams and wild mountain ranges, men were infinitesimal specks hurrying here and there about their self-appointed tasks.  Those like himself and Doris, who did not mind the privations inseparable from that remoteness, fared well enough.  The land held out to them manifold promises.  Hollister looked at the red-brown shingle bolts accumulating behind the boom-sticks and felt that inner satisfaction which comes of success achieved by plan and labor.  If his mutilated face had been capable of expression, it would have reflected pride, satisfaction.  Out of the apparent wreckage of his life he was laying the foundations of something permanent, something abiding, an enduring source of good.  He would tangle his fingers in Doris’ brown hair and feel glad.

Then perhaps his eyes would shift downstream to where Bland’s stark, weather-beaten cabin lifted its outline against the green thickets, and he would think uneasily upon what insecure tenure, upon what deliberate violation of law and of current morality he held his dearest treasure.  What would she think, if she knew, this dainty creature cuddling against his knee?  He would wake in the night and lie on elbow staring at her face in the moonlight,—­delicate-skinned as a child’s, that lovable, red-lipped mouth, those dear, blind eyes which sometimes gave him the illusion of seeing clearly out of their gray depths.

What would she think?  What would she, say?  What would she do?  He did not know.  It troubled him to think of this.  If he could have swept Myra out of North America with a wave of his hand, he would have made one sweeping gesture.  He was jealous of his happiness, his security, and Myra’s presence was not only a reminder; it had the effect upon him of a threat he could not ignore.

Yet he was compelled to ignore it.  She and Doris had become fast friends.  It all puzzled Hollister very much sometimes.  Except for the uprooting, the undermining influences of his war experience, he would have been revolted at his own actions.  He had committed technical bigamy.  His children would be illegitimate before the law.

Hollister’s morality was the morality of his early environment; his class was that magnificently inert middle class which sets its face rigorously against change, which proceeds naively upon the assumption that everything has always been as it is and will continue to be so; that the man and woman who deviates from the accepted conventions in living, loving, marrying, breeding—­even in dying—­does so because of innate depravity, and that such people must be damned by bell, book and candle in this world, as they shall assuredly be damned in the next.

Hollister could no longer believe that goodness and badness were wholly matters of free will.  From the time he put on the king’s uniform in a spirit of idealistic service down to the day he met Doris Cleveland on the steamer, his experience had been a succession of devastating incidents.  What had happened to him had happened to others.  Life laid violent hands on them and tossed them about like frail craft on a windy sea.  The individual was caught in the vortex of the social whirlpool, and what he did, what he thought and felt, what he became, was colored and conditioned by a multitude of circumstances that flowed about him as irresistibly as an ocean tide.