Myra turned her back on them, walked away and stood on the river bank.  Hollister stared at his wife.  He struggled with an old sensation, one that he had thought long put by,—­a sense of the intolerable burden of existence in which nothing was sure but sorrow.  And he was aware that he must dissemble all such feelings.  He must not let Doris know how he dreaded that hour in which she should first see clearly his mutilated face.

“You ought to see an oculist,” he said at last.

“An oculist?  Eye specialists—­I saw a dozen of them,” she replied.  “They were never able to do anything—­except to tell me I would never see again.  A fig for the doctors.  They were wrong when they said my sight was wholly destroyed.  They’d probably be wrong again in the diagnosis and treatment.  Nature seems to be doing the job.  Let her have her way.”

They discussed that after Myra was gone, sitting on a log together in the warm sun, with the baby kicking his heels on the spread quilt.  They continued the discussion after they went back to the house.  Hollister dreaded uncertainty.  He wanted to know how great a measure of her sight would return, and in what time.  He did not belittle the oculists because they had once mistaken.  Neither did Doris, when she recovered from the excitement engendered by the definite assurance that her eyes were ever so slightly resuming their normal function.  She did believe that her sight was being restored naturally, as torn flesh heals or a broken bone knits, and she was doubtful if any eye specialist could help that process.  But she agreed in the end that it would be as well to know if anything could be done and what would aid instead of retard her recovery.

“But not for awhile,” she said.  “It’s just a glimmer.  Wait a few days.  If this fog keeps clearing away, then we’ll go.”

They were sitting on their porch steps.  Doris put her arms around him.

“When I can see, I’ll be a real partner,” she said happily.  “There are so many things I can do that can’t be done without eyes.  And half the fun of living is in sharing the discoveries one makes about things with some one else.  Sight will give me back all the books I want to read, all the beautiful things I want to see.  I’ll be able to climb hills and paddle a canoe, to go with you wherever you want to take me.  Won’t it be splendid?  I’ve only been half a woman.  I have wondered sometimes how long it would be before you grew weary of my moods and my helplessness.”

And Hollister could only pat her cheek and tell her that he loved her, that her eyes made no difference.  He could not voice the fear he had that her recovered sight would make the greatest difference, that the reality of him, the distorted visage which peered at him from a mirror would make her loathe him.  He was not a fool.  He knew that people, the women especially, shrank from the crippled, the disfigured, the malformed, the horrible.  That had been his