Perhaps he would have made that
decision in any case. He had no friends to be shocked. He had no
reputation to be smirched. He was, he had said with a bitter
wistfulness, a stray dog. And Doris Cleveland was in very much the
same position. Two unfortunates cleaving to each other, moved by a
genuine human passion. If they could be happy together, they had a
right to be together. Hollister challenged his reason to refute that
cry of his heart.
He disposed finally of the last uncertainty,--whether he should tell
Doris. And a negative to that rose instantly to his lips. The past was
a dead past. Let it remain dead--buried. Its ghost would never rise to
trouble them. Of that he was very sure.
Hollister went to bed, but not to sleep. He heard a great clock
somewhere in the town strike twelve and then one, while he still lay
staring up at the dusky ceiling. But his thoughts had taken a
pleasanter road. He had turned over the pages of his life history,
scanned them with a gloomy and critical eye, and cast them with
decisive finality into the waste basket.
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