“Worse,” Hollister muttered, “because I sulked and brooded and raged against what had overtaken me.  Yet if I hadn’t reacted so violently, I should never have come here to hide away from what hurt me.  So I wouldn’t have met you.  That would almost make one think there is something in the destiny that you and Lawanne smile at.”

“Destiny and chance:  two names for the same thing, and that thing wholly unaccountable, beyond the scope of human foresight,” Doris replied.  “Things happen; that’s all we can generally say.  We don’t know why.  Speaking of Lawanne, I wonder if he really does intend to stay here this winter and write a book?”

“He says so.”

“He’ll be company for us,” she reflected.  “He’s clever and a little bit cynical, but I like him.  He’ll help to keep us from getting bored with each other.”

“Do you think there is any danger of that?” Hollister inquired.

She tweaked his ear playfully.

“People do, you know.  But I hardly think we shall.  Not for a year or two, anyway.  Not till the house gets full of babies and the stale odor of uneventful, routine, domestic life.  Then you may.”

“Huh,” he grunted derisively, “catch me.  I know what I want and what contents me.  We’ll beat the game handily; and we’ll beat it together.

“Why, good Lord,” he cried sharply, “what would be the good of all this effort, only for you?  Where would be the fun of working and planning and anticipating things?  Nearly every man, I believe,” he concluded thoughtfully, “keeps his gait because of some woman.  There is always the shadow of a woman over him, the picture of some woman—­past, present, or future, to egg him on to this or that.”

“To keep him,” Doris laughed, “in the condition a poet once described as: 

    ’This fevered flesh that goes on groping, wailing
        Toward the gloom.’”

They both laughed.  They felt no gloom.  The very implication of gloom, of fevered flesh, was remote from that which they had won together.

When Hollister went up to the works in the morning, he found Mills humped on a box beside the fireplace in the old cabin, reading “The Man Who Couldn’t Die.”  At noon he was gone somewhere.  Over the noon meal in the split-cedar mess-house, the other bolt cutters spoke derisively of the man who laid off work for half a day to read a book.  That was beyond their comprehension.

But Hollister thought he understood.

Later in the afternoon, as he came down the hill, he looked from the vantage of height and saw Lawanne’s winter quarters already taking form on the river bank, midway between his own place and Bland’s.  It grew to completion rapidly in the next few days, taking on at last a shake roof of hand-dressed cedar to keep out the cold rains that now began to beat down, the forerunner of that interminable downpour which deluges the British Columbia coast from November to April, the torrential weeping of the skies upon a porous soil which nourishes vast forests of enormous trees, jungles of undergrowth tropical in its density, in its variety of shrub and fern.