recommend him for treatment in the mental hospital at Essondale. They
would not understand.

Hollister covered his face with a swift, tight clasping of his hands.
Something rose chokingly in his throat. Into his eyes a slow, scalding
wetness crept like a film. He set his teeth in one corner of his
pillow.




CHAPTER II


When Hollister was eighteen years old he had been briefly troubled by
an affliction of his eyes brought on from overstudy. His father, at
the time, was interested in certain timber operations on the coast of
British Columbia. In these rude camps, therefore, young Hollister
spent a year. During that twelve months books were prohibited. He
lived in the woods, restored the strength of his eyes amid that
restful greenness, hardened a naturally vigorous body by healthy,
outdoor labor with the logging crews. He returned home to go on with
his University work in eastern Canada with unforgettable impressions
of the Pacific coast, a boyish longing to go back to that region where
the mountains receded from the sea in wave after wave of enormous
height, where the sea lapped with green lips at the foot of the ranges
and thrust winding arms back into the very heart of the land, and
where the land itself, delta and slope and slide-engraved declivities,
was clothed with great, silent forests, upon which man, with his axes
and saws, his machinery, his destructiveness in the name of industry,