"Eyes all right?"
"I don't know. I suppose so," Hollister replied. "She didn't say. She merely wrote that she was coming on the Wednesday steamer."
"Well, that'll be all right too," Lawanne said. "You'll get over being so down in the mouth then."
"Maybe," Hollister muttered.
"Of course. What rot to think anything else."
Hollister did not contradict this. It was what he wanted to feel and think, and could not. He understood that Lawanne, whatever his thought, was trying to hearten him. And he appreciated that, although he knew the matter rested in his wife's own hands and nothing any one else could do or say had the slightest bearing on it. His meeting with Doris would be either an ordeal or a triumph.
"I might get Charlie Mills to go with me," Lawanne pursued his own thought.
"Mills didn't go out with the rest of the crew?" Hollister asked. He knew, of course, that Charlie Mills was still in the Toba valley because he had seen him with his own eyes not more than half an hour earlier. His question, however, was not altogether idle. He wondered whether Mills had gone out and come back, or if he had not left at all.
"No. He turned back at the last minute, for some reason. He's camping in one of the old T. & T. shacks below Carr's. I rather like Mills. He's interesting when you can get him to loosen up. Queer, tense sort of beggar at times, though. A good man to go into the hills with—to go anywhere with—although he might not show to great advantage in a drawing-room. By Jove, you know, Hollister, it doesn't seem like nine months since I settled down in this cabin. Now I'm about due to go back to the treadmill."