experience.  It had very nearly driven him mad.  He had no illusions about the men who worked for him, about his neighbors.  They found him endurable, and that was about all.  If Doris Cleveland had seen him clearly that day on the steamer, if she had been able to critically survey the unlovely thing that war had made of him, she might have pitied him.  But would she have found pleasure in the sound of his voice, the touch of his hand?  Hollister’s intelligence answered “No.”  For externally his appearance would have been a shock, would have inhibited the pleasant intimacy at which they so soon arrived.

Doris made light of his disfigurement.  She could comprehend clearly many things unseen—­but not that.  Hollister knew she must have created some definite image of him in her mind; something, he suspected, which must correspond closely to her ideal of a man, something that was dear to her.  If that ideal did not—­and his intelligence insisted that he could not—­survive the reality, then his house was built on sand and must topple.

And he must dig and pry at the foundations.  He must do all that could be done for her eyes.  That was her right,—­to see, to be free of her prison of darkness, to be restored to the sight of beauty, to unclouded vision of the world and all it contained, no matter what the consequence to him.  He would play the game, although he felt that he would lose.

A cloud seemed to settle on him when he considered that he might lose everything that made life worth while.  And it would be an irrevocable loss.  He would never again have courage to weave the threads of his existence into another such goodly pattern.  Even if he had the courage, he would never have the chance.  No such fortuitous circumstances would ever again throw him into the arms of a woman,—­not such a woman as Doris Cleveland.

Hollister looked at her beside him, and his heart ached to think that presently she might not sit so with her hand on his knee, looking up at him with lips parted in a happy smile, gray eyes eager with anticipation under the long, curving, brown lashes.  She was so very dear to him.  Not alone because of the instinctive yearning of flesh to flesh, not altogether because of the grace of her vigorous young body, the comeliness of her face, the shining coils of brown hair that gave him a strange pleasure just to stroke.  Not alone because of the quick, keen mind that so often surprised him by its sureness.  There was some charm more subtle than these, something to which he responded without knowing clearly what it was, something that made the mere knowledge of her presence in his house a comfort, no matter whether he was beside her or miles away.