Hollister no longer had a philosophy of life in which motives and actions were tagged and labeled according to their kind.  He had lost his old confidence in certain arbitrary moral dicta which are the special refuge of those whose intelligence is keen enough to grapple competently with any material problem but who stand aghast, apprehensive and uncomprehending, before a spiritual struggle, before the wavering gusts of human passion.

If he judged himself by his own earlier standard he was damned, and he had dragged Doris Cleveland down with him.  So was Myra smeared with the pitch of moral obloquy.  They were sinners all.  Pain should be their desert; shame and sorrow their portion.

Why?  Because driven by the need within them, blinded by the dust of circumstance and groping for security amid the vast confusion which had overtaken them, they reached out and grasped such semblence of happiness as came within reach of their uncertain hands.

The world at large, Hollister was aware, would be decisively intolerant of them all, if the world should by chance be called to pass judgment.

But he himself could no more pass harsh judgment upon his former wife than he could feel within himself a personal conviction of sin.  Love, he perceived, was not a fixed emotion.  It was like a fire which glows bright when plied with fuel and burns itself out when it is no longer fed.  To some it was casual, incidental; to others an imperative law of being.  Myra remained essentially the same woman, whether she loved him or some other man.  Who was he to judge her?  She had loved him and then ceased to love him.  Beyond that, her life was her own to do with as she chose.

Nor could Hollister, when he faced the situation squarely, feel that he was less a man, less upright, less able to bear himself decently before his fellows than he had ever been.  Sometimes he would grow impatient with thinking and put it all by.  He had his moods.  But also he had his work, the imperative necessity of constant labor to satisfy the needs both of the present and the future.  No man goes into the wilderness with only his hands and a few tools and wins security by any short and easy road.  There were a great many things Hollister was determined to have for himself and Doris and their children,—­for he did not close his eyes to the natural fulfilment of the mating impulse.  He did not spare himself.  Like Mills, he worked with a prodigious energy.  Sometimes he wondered if dreams akin to his own drove Charlie Mills to sweat and strain, to pile up each day double the amount of split cedar, and double for himself the wages earned by the other two men,—­who were themselves no laggards with axe and saw.  Or if Mills fantastically personified the timber as something which stood between him and his aching desire and so attacked it with all his lusty young strength.