Hollister and Mills went back to their work on the boom.  When they finished their day’s work, Lawanne had gone down to the Blands’ with Myra.  After supper, as Mills rose to leave for the upper camp, he said to Doris: 

“Have you got that book of his—­about the fellow that couldn’t die?  I’d like to read it.”

Doris gave him the book.  He went away with it in his hand.

Hollister looked after him curiously.  There was strong meat in Lawanne’s book.  He wondered if Mills would digest it.  And he wondered a little if Mills regarded Lawanne as a rival, if he were trying to test the other man’s strength by his work.

Away down the river, now that dark had fallen, the light in Bland’s house shone yellow.  There was a red, glowing spot on the river bank.  That would be Lawanne’s camp.  Hollister shut the door on the chill October night and turned back to his easy-chair by the stove.  Doris had finished her work.  She sat at the piano, her fingers picking out some slow, languorous movement that he did not know, but which soothed him like a lullaby.

Vigorously he dissented from Lawanne’s philosophy of enslavement.  He, Hollister, was a free man.  Yes, he was free,—­but only when he could shut the door on the past, only when he could shut away all the world just as he had but now shut out the valley, the cold frosty night, his neighbors and his men, by the simple closing of a door.  But he could not shut away the consciousness that they were there, that he must meet Myra and her vague questioning, Mills with his strange repression, his brooding air.  He must see them again, be perplexed by them, perhaps find his own life, his own happiness, tangled in the web of their affairs.  Hollister could frown over that unwelcome possibility.  He could say to himself that it was only an impression; that he was a fool to labor under that sense of insecurity.  But he could not help it.  Life was like that.  No man stood alone.  No man could ever completely achieve mastery of his relations to his fellows.  Until life became extinct, men and women would be swayed and conditioned by blind human forces, governed by relations casual or intimate, imposed upon them by the very law of their being.  Who was he to escape?

No, Hollister reflected, he could not insulate himself and Doris against this environment, against these people.  They would have to take things as they came and be thankful they were no worse.

Doris left the piano.  She sat on a low stool beside him, leaned her brown head against him.

“It won’t be so long before I have to go to town, Bob,” she said dreamily.  “I hope the winter is open so that the work goes on well.  And sometimes I hope that the snow shuts everything down, so that you’ll be there with me.  I’m not very consistent, am I?”

“You suit me,” he murmured.  “And I’ll be there whether the work goes on or not.”

“What an element of the unexpected, the unforeseen, is at work all the time,” she said.  “A year ago you and I didn’t even know of each other’s existence.  I used to sit and wonder what would become of me.  It was horrible sometimes to go about in the dark, existing like a plant in a cellar, longing for all that a woman longs for if she is a woman and knows herself.  And you were in pretty much the same boat.”