For a long time Myra had ceased to trouble him with the irritating uncertainty of their first meetings.  She apparently accepted him and his mutilated face as part of Doris Hollister’s background and gave him no more thought or attention.  Always in the little gatherings at his house Hollister contrived to keep in the shadow, to be an onlooker rather than a participant,—­just as Charlie Mills did.  Hollister was still sensitive about his face.  He was doubly sensitive because he dreaded any comment upon his disfigurement reaching his wife’s ears.  He had succeeded so well in thus effacing himself that Myra seemed to regard him as if he were no more than a grotesque bit of furniture to which she had become accustomed.  All the sense of sinister possibilities in her presence, all that uneasy dread of her nearness, that consciousness of her as an impending threat, had finally come to seem nothing more than mere figments of his imagination.  Especially since their son was born.  That seemed to establish the final bond between himself and Doris.  Myra, the past which so poignantly included Myra, held less and less significance.  He could look at Myra and wonder if this was the same woman he had held in his arms, whose kisses had been freely and gladly bestowed upon him; if all the passion and pain of their life together, of their tearing apart, had ever really been.  He had got so far beyond that it seemed unreal.  And lately there had settled upon him a surety that to Myra it must all be just as unreal—­that she could not possibly harbor any suspicion that he was her legal husband, hiding behind a mask of scars—­and that even if she did suspect, that suspicion could never be translated into action which could deflect ever so slightly the current of his present existence.

He was working at the chute mouth when Bland came to ask for that loan.  He continued to work there.  Not long after he noticed Bland leave his own house and go down the flat, he saw Myra coming along the bank.  That was nothing.  There was a well-beaten path there that she traveled nearly every afternoon.  He felt his first tentative misgiving when he saw that Myra did not stop at the house, that she walked past and straight towards where he worked.  And this slight misgiving grew to a certainty of impending trouble when she came up, when she faced him.  Movement and the crisp air had kindled a glow in her cheeks.  But something besides the winter air had kindled an almost unnatural glow in her eyes.  They were like dusky pansies.  She was, he thought, with curious self-detachment, a strikingly beautiful woman.  And he recalled that anger or excitement, any emotion that stirred her, always made her seem more alluring, always made her glow and sparkle as if in such moments she was a perfect human jewel, flashing in the sun of life.

She nodded to Hollister, looked down on the cedar blocks floating in the cold river, stood a moment to watch the swift descent of other bolts hurtling down the chute and joining their fellows with successive splashes.