His love
for her had not been borne of pity. He had never thought of her as
helpless. She was too vivid, too passionately alive in body and mind
to inspire him with that curiously mixed feeling which the strong
bestow upon the maimed and the weak. But there were certain risks of
which he was conscious, no matter that Doris laughingly disclaimed
them. With a stick and her ears and fingers she could go anywhere, she
said; and she was not far wrong, as Hollister knew.
Within forty-eight hours she had the run of the house and the cleared
portion of land surrounding. She could put her hand on every item of
her kitchen equipment. She could get kindling out of the wood box;
light a fire in the stove as well as he. All the stock of food staples
lay in an orderly arrangement of her own choice on the kitchen
shelves. She knew every object in the two rooms, each chair and box
and stool, the step at the front door, the short path to the river
bank, the trunk of the branchy maple, the rugged bark of a great
spruce behind the house, as if within her brain there existed an exact
diagram of the whole and with which as a guide she could move within
those limits as swiftly and surely as Hollister himself.
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