Love, home, all that sweet companionship which he had gained, the curious man-pride he had in that morsel of humanity that was his son,—­he wondered if he were to see all these slowly or swiftly withdrawn from him?

Well, he would soon know.  He stood up and looked far along the valley.  Suddenly it seemed a malevolent place, oppressive, threatening, grim in spite of its beauty.  It seemed as if something had been lurking there ready to strike.  The fire had swept away his timber.  In that brilliant sunshine, amid all that beauty, Myra’s life had been snuffed out like a blown candle flame—­to no purpose.  Or was there some purpose in it all?  Was some sentient force chastening him, scourging him with rods for the good of his soul?  Was it for some such inscrutable purpose that men died by the hundred thousand in Europe?  Was that why Doris Cleveland had been deprived of her sight?  Why Myra had been torn by contradictory passions during her troubled life and had perished at last, a victim of passions that burst control?  All this evil that some hidden good might accrue?  Hollister bared his teeth in defiance of such a conclusion.  But he was in a mood to defy either gods or devils.  In that mood he saw the Toba valley, the whole earth, as a sinister place,—­a place where beauty was a mockery, where impassive silence was merely the threatening hush before some elemental fury.  This serene, indifferent beauty was hateful to him in that moment, the Promethean rock to which circumstance had chained him to suffer.  It needed only as a capsheaf the gleam of incredulous dismay which should appear in his wife’s eyes when she looked first upon the mutilated tissue, the varying scars and cicatrices, the twisted mask that would be revealed to her as the face of her husband.

This test was at hand.  He reassured himself, as he had vainly reassured himself before, by every resource his mind and courage could muster, and still he was afraid.  He saw nothing ahead but a black void in which there was neither love nor companionship nor friendly hands and faces, nothing but a deep gloom in which he should wander alone,—­not because he wished to, but because he must.

He turned with a sudden resolution, crossed the low rocky point and went down to the flat.  He passed under the trestle which carried the chute.  The path to the house turned sharply around a clump of alder.  He rounded these leafy trees and came upon Doris standing by a low stump.  She stood as she did the first time he saw her on the steamer, in profile, only instead of the steamer rail her elbow rested on the stump, and she stared, with her chin nestled in the palm of one hand, at the gray, glacial stream instead of the uneasy heave of a winter sea.  And Hollister thought with a slow constriction gathering in his breast that life was a thing of vain repetitions; he remembered so vividly how he felt that day when he stood watching her by the rail, thinking with a dull resentment that she would presently look at him and turn away.  And he was thinking that again.