had as yet made little more impression than the nibbling of a single
mouse on the rim of a large cheese.

When he graduated he did return on a thirty-days' vacation, which the
lure of the semi-wild country prolonged for six months,--a whole
summer in which he resisted the importunities of his father to take
his part in the business upon which rested the family fortune.
Hollister never forgot that summer. He was young. He had no cares. He
was free. All life spread before him in a vast illusion of
unquestionable joyousness. There was a rose-pink tinge over these
months in which he fished salmon and trout, climbed the frowning
escarpments of the Coast Range, gave himself up to the spell of a
region which is still potent with the charm of the wilderness untamed.
There had always lingered in his receptive mind a memory of profound
beauty, a stark beauty of color and outline, an unhampered freedom,
opportunity as vast as the mountains that looked from their cool
heights down on the changeful sea and the hushed forests, brooding in
the sun and rain.

So he had come back again, after seven years, scarcely knowing why he
came, except that the coast beckoned with a remote gesture, and that
he desired to get as far as possible from the charnel house of Europe,
and that he shrank from presenting himself among the acquaintances of
his boyhood and the few distant relatives left him upon the Atlantic
seaboard.

His father died shortly after Hollister married. He had left his son
property aggregating several thousand dollars and a complicated
timber business disorganized by his sudden death. Hollister was
young, sanguine, clever in the accepted sense of cleverness. He had