“Maybe mine will fade too,” Hollister suggested.

“Oh, you’re fishing for compliments now,” she laughed.  “You know very well you are.  But we’re pretty lucky, Robert mine, just the same.  We’ve gained a lot.  We haven’t lost anything yet.  I wouldn’t back-track, not an inch.  Would you—­honest, now?”

Hollister answered that in a manner which seemed to him suitable to the occasion.  And while he stood with his arm around her, Doris startled him.

“Myra told me a curious thing the other day,” she said.  “She has been married twice.  She told me that her first husband’s name was the same as yours—­Bob Hollister—­that he was killed in France in 1917.  She says that you somehow remind her of him.”

“There were a good many men killed in France in ’17,” he observed.  “And Hollister is not such an uncommon name.  Does the lady suspect I’m the reincarnation of her dear departed?  She seems to have consoled herself for the loss, anyway.”

“I doubt if she has,” Doris answered.  “She doesn’t unburden her soul to me, but I have the feeling that she is not exactly a happy woman.”

The matter rested there.  Doris went away to do something about the house.  Hollister stood glowering at the distant outline of Bland’s cabin.  A slow uneasiness grew on him.  What did Myra mean by that confidence?  Did she mean anything?  He shook himself impatiently.  He had a profound distaste for that revelation.  In itself it was nothing, unless some obscure motive lurked behind.  That troubled him.  Myra meant nothing—­or she meant mischief.  Why, he could not say.  She was quit of him at her own desire.  She had made a mouthful of his modest fortune.  If she had somehow guessed the real man behind that mask of scars, and from some obscure, perverted motive meant to bring shipwreck to both of them once more, Hollister felt that he would strangle her without a trace of remorse.

CHAPTER XIV

All that summer the price of cedar went creeping up.  For a while this was only in keeping with the slow ascension of commodity costs which continued long after the guns ceased to thunder.  But presently cedar on the stump, in the log, in the finished product, began to soar while other goods slowed or halted altogether in their mysterious climb to inaccessable heights,—­and cedar was not a controlled industry, not a monopoly.  Shingles and dressed cedar were scarce, that was all.  For the last two years of the war most of the available man-power and machinery of British Columbia loggers had been given over to airplane spruce.  Carpenters had laid down their tools and gone to the front.  House builders had ceased to build houses while the vast cloud of European uncertainty hung over the nation.  All across North America the wind and weather had taken toll of roofs, and these must be repaired.  The nation did not cease to breed while its men died daily by thousands.  And with the signing of the