"Oh, nothing," she said wearily, and turned to the sputtering bacon.

Fyfe put his foot up on the stove front and drummed a tattoo on his mackinaw clad knee.

"Aren't you getting pretty sick of this sort of work, these more or less uncomfortable surroundings, and the sort of people you have to come in contact with?" he asked pointedly.

"I am," she returned as bluntly, "but I think that's rather an impertinent question, Mr. Fyfe."

He passed imperturbably over this reproof, and his glance turned briefly toward the dining room. Katy John was still noisily at work.

"You hate it," he said positively. "I know you do. I've seen your feelings many a time. I don't blame you. It's a rotten business for a girl with your tastes and bringing up. And I'm afraid you'll find it worse, if this snow stays long. I know what a logging camp is when work stops, and whisky creeps in, and the boss lets go his hold for the time being."

"That may be true," she returned gloomily, "but I don't see why you should enumerate these disagreeable things for my benefit."

"I'm going to show you a way out," he said softly. "I've been thinking it over for quite a while. I want you to marry me."

Stella gasped.

"Mr. Fyfe."

"Listen," he said peremptorily, leaning closer to her and lowering his voice. "I have an idea that you're going to say you don't love me. Lord, I know that. But you hate this. It grates against every inclination of yours like a file on steel. I wouldn't jar on you like that. I wouldn't permit you to live in surroundings that would. That's the material side of it. Nobody can live on day dreams. I like you, Stella Benton, a whole lot more than I'd care to say right out loud. You and I together could make a home we'd be proud of. I want you, and you want to get away from this. It's natural. Marry me and play the game fair, and I don't think you'll be sorry. I'm putting it as baldly as I can. You stand to win everything with nothing to lose—but your domestic chains—" the gleam of a smile lit up his features for a second. "Won't you take a chance?" "No," she declared impulsively. "I won't be a party to any such cold-blooded transaction."

"You don't seem to understand me," he said soberly. "I don't want to hand out any sentiment, but it makes me sore to see you wasting yourself on this sort of thing. If you must do it, why don't you do it for somebody who'll make it worth while? If you'd use the brains God gave you, you know that lots of couples have married on flimsier grounds than we'd have. How can a man and a woman really know anything about each other till they've lived together? Just because we don't marry with our heads in the fog is no reason we shouldn't get on fine. What are you going to do? Stick here at this till you go crazy? You won't get away. You don't realize what a one-idea, determined person this brother of yours is. He has just one object in life, and he'll use everything and everybody in sight to attain that object. He means to succeed and he will. You're purely incidental; but he has that perverted, middle-class family pride that will make him prevent you from getting out and trying your own wings. Nature never intended a woman like you to be a celibate, any more than I was so intended. And sooner or late you'll marry somebody—if only to hop out of the fire into the frying pan."

"I hate you," she flashed passionately, "when you talk like that."

"No, you don't," he returned quietly. "You hate what I say, because it's the truth—and it's humiliating to be helpless. You think I don't sabe? But I'm putting a weapon into your hand. Let's put it differently; leave out the sentiment for a minute. We'll say that I want a housekeeper, preferably an ornamental one, because I like beautiful things. You want to get away from this drudgery. That's what it is, simple drudgery. You crave lots of things you can't get by yourself, but that you could help me get for you. There's things lacking in your life, and so is there in mine. Why shouldn't we go partners? You think about it."

"I don't need to," she answered coolly. "It wouldn't work. You don't appear to have any idea what it means for a woman to give herself up body and soul to a man she doesn't care for. For me it would be plain selling myself. I haven't the least affection for you personally. I might even detest you."

"You wouldn't," he said positively.

"What makes you so sure of that?" she demanded.

"It would sound conceited if I told you why," he drawled. "Listen. We're not gods and goddesses, we human beings. We're not, after all, in our real impulses, so much different from the age when a man took his club and went after a female that looked good to him. They mated, and raised their young, and very likely faced on an average fewer problems than arise in modern marriages supposedly ordained in Heaven. You'd have the one big problem solved,—the lack of means to live decently,—which wrecks more homes than anything else, far more than lack of love. Affection doesn't seem to thrive on poverty. What is love?"

His voice took on a challenging note.

Stella shook her head. He puzzled her, wholly serious one minute, a whimsical smile twisting up the corners of his mouth the next. And he surprised her too by his sureness of utterance on subjects she had not supposed would enter such a man's mind.

"I don't know," she answered absently, turning over strips of bacon with the long-handled fork.

"There you are," he said. "I don't know either. We'd start even, then, for the sake of argument. No, I guess we wouldn't either, because you're the only woman I've run across so far with whom I could calmly contemplate spending the rest of my life in close contact. That's a fact. To me it's a highly important fact. You don't happen to have any such feeling about me, eh?"

"No. I hadn't even thought of you in that way," Stella answered truthfully.

"You want to think about me," he said calmly. "You want to think about me from every possible angle, because I'm going to come back and ask you this same question every once in a while, so long as you're in reach and doing this dirty work for a thankless boss. You want to think of me as a possible refuge from a lot of disagreeable things. I'd like to have you to chum with, and I'd like to have some incentive to put a big white bungalow on that old foundation for us two," he smiled. "I'll never do it for myself alone. Go on. Take a gambling chance and marry me, Stella. Say yes, and say it now."

But she shook her head resolutely, and as Katy John came in just then, Fyfe took his foot off the stove and went out of the kitchen. He threw a glance over his shoulder at Stella, a broad smile, as if to say that he harbored no grudge, and nursed no wound in his vanity because she would have none of him.

Katy rang the breakfast gong. Five minutes later the tattoo of knives and forks and spoons told of appetites in process of appeasement. Charlie came into the kitchen in the midst of this, bearing certain unmistakable signs. His eyes were inflamed, his cheeks still bearing the flush of liquor. His demeanor was that of a man suffering an intolerable headache and correspondingly short-tempered. Stella barely spoke to him. It was bad enough for a man to make a beast of himself with whisky, but far worse was his gambling streak. There were so many little ways in which she could have eased things with a few dollars; yet he always grumbled when she spoke of money, always put her off with promises to be redeemed when business got better.

Stella watched him bathe his head copiously in cold water and then seat himself at the long table, trying to force food upon an aggrieved and rebellious stomach. Gradually a flood of recklessness welled up in her breast.

"For two pins I would marry Jack Fyfe," she told herself savagely. "Anything would be better than this."



CHAPTER XI

THE PLUNGE

Stella went over that queer debate a good many times in the ten days that followed. It revealed Jack Fyfe to her in a new, inexplicable light, at odd variance with her former conception of the man. She could not have visualized him standing with one foot on the stove front speaking calmly of love and marriage if she had not seen him with her own eyes, heard him with somewhat incredulous ears. She had continued to endow him with the attributes of unrestrained passion, of headlong leaping to the goal of his desires, of brushing aside obstacles and opposition with sheer brute force; and he had shown unreckoned qualities of restraint, of understanding. She was not quite sure if this were guile or sensible consideration. He had put his case logically, persuasively even. She was very sure that if he had adopted emotional methods, she would have been repelled. If he had laid siege to her hand and heart in the orthodox fashion, she would have raised that siege in short order. As it stood, in spite of her words to him, there was in her own mind a lack of finality. As she went about her daily tasks, that prospect of trying a fresh fling at the world as Jack Fyfe's wife tantalized her with certain desirable features.

Was it worth while to play the game as she must play it for some time to come, drudge away at mean, sordid work and amid the dreariest sort of environment? At best, she could only get away from Charlie's camp and begin along new lines that might perhaps be little better, that must inevitably lie among strangers in a strange land. To what end? What did she want of life, anyway? She had to admit that she could not say fully and explicitly what she wanted. When she left out her material wants, there was nothing but a nebulous craving for—what? Love, she assumed. And she could not define love, except as some incomprehensible transport of emotion which irresistibly drew a man and a woman together, a divine fire kindled in two hearts. It was not a thing she could vouch for by personal experience. It might never touch and warm her, that divine fire. Instinct did now and then warn her that some time it would wrap her like a flame. But in the meantime—Life had her in midstream of its remorseless, drab current, sweeping her along. A foothold offered. Half a loaf, a single slice of bread even, is better than none.

Jack Fyfe did not happen in again for nearly two weeks and then only to pay a brief call, but he stole an opportunity, when Katy John was not looking, to whisper in Stella's ear:

"Have you been thinking about that bungalow of ours?"

She shook her head, and he went out quietly, without another word. He neither pleaded nor urged, and perhaps that was wisest, for in spite of herself Stella thought of him continually. He loomed always before her, a persistent, compelling factor.

She knew at last, beyond any gainsaying, that the venture tempted, largely perhaps because it contained so great an element of the unknown. To get away from this soul-dwarfing round meant much. She felt herself reasoning desperately that the frying pan could not be worse than the fire, and held at least the merit of greater dignity and freedom from the twin evils of poverty and thankless domestic slavery.

While she considered this, pro and con, shrinking from such a step one hour, considering it soberly the next, the days dragged past in wearisome sequence. The great depth of snow endured, was added to by spasmodic flurries. The frosts held. The camp seethed with the restlessness of the men. In default of the daily work that consumed their superfluous energy, the loggers argued and fought, drank and gambled, made "rough house" in their sleeping quarters till sometimes Stella's cheeks blanched and she expected murder to be done. Twice the Chickamin came back from Roaring Springs with whisky aboard, and a protracted debauch ensued. Once a drunken logger shouldered his way into the kitchen to leer unpleasantly at Stella, and, himself inflamed by liquor and the affront, Charlie Benton beat the man until his face was a mass of bloody bruises. That was only one of a dozen brutal incidents. All the routine discipline of the woods seemed to have slipped out of Benton's hands. When the second whisky consignment struck the camp, Stella stayed in her room, refusing to cook until order reigned again. Benton grumblingly took up the burden himself. With Katy's help and that of sundry loggers, he fed the roistering crew, but for his sister it was a two-day period of protesting disgust.

That mood, like so many of her moods, relapsed into dogged endurance. She took up the work again when Charlie promised that no more whisky should be allowed in the camp.

"Though it's ten to one I won't have a corporal's guard left when I want to start work again," he grumbled. "I'm well within my rights if I put my foot down hard on any jinks when there's work, but I have no license to set myself up as guardian of a logger's morals and pocketbook when I have nothing for him to do. These fellows are paying their board. So long as they don't make themselves obnoxious to you, I don't see that it's our funeral whether they're drunk or sober. They'd tell me so quick enough."

To this pronouncement of expediency Stella made no rejoinder. She no longer expected anything much of Charlie, in the way of consideration. So far as she could see, she, his sister, was little more to him than one of his loggers; a little less important than, say, his donkey engineer. In so far as she conduced to the well-being of the camp and effected a saving to his credit in the matter of preparing food, he valued her and was willing to concede a minor point to satisfy her. Beyond that Stella felt that he did not go. Five years in totally different environments had dug a great gulf between them. He felt an arbitrary sense of duty toward her, she knew, but in its manifestations it never lapped over the bounds of his own immediate self-interest.

And so when she blundered upon knowledge of a state of affairs which must have existed under her very nose for some time, there were few remnants of sisterly affection to bid her seek extenuating circumstances.

Katy John proved the final straw. Just by what means Stella grew to suspect any such moral lapse on Benton's part is wholly irrelevant. Once the unpleasant likelihood came to her notice, she took measures to verify her suspicion, and when convinced she taxed her brother with it, to his utter confusion.

"What kind of a man are you?" she cried at last in shamed anger. "Is there nothing too low for you to dabble in? Haven't you any respect for anything or anybody, yourself included?"

"Oh, don't talk like a damned Puritan," Benton growled, though his tanned face was burning. "This is what comes of having women around the camp. I'll send the girl away."

"You—you beast!" she flared—and ran out of the kitchen to seek refuge in her own room and cry into her pillow some of the dumb protest that surged up within her. For her knowledge of passion and the workings of passion as they bore upon the relations of a man and a woman were at once vague and tinctured with inflexible tenets of morality, the steel-hard conception of virtue which is the bulwark of middle-class theory for its wives and daughters and sisters—with an eye consistently blind to the concealed lapses of its men.

Stella Benton passed that morning through successive stages of shocked amazement, of pity, and disgust. As between her brother and the Siwash girl, she saw little to choose. From her virtuous pinnacle she abhorred both. If she had to continue intimate living with them, she felt that she would be utterly defiled, degraded to their level. That was her first definite conclusion.

After a time she heard Benton come into their living room and light a fire in the heater. She dried her eyes and went out to face him.

"Charlie," she declared desperately, "I can't stay here any longer. It's simply impossible."

"Don't start that song again. We've had it often enough," he answered stubbornly. "You're not going—not till spring. I'm not going to let you go in the frame of mind you're in right now, anyhow. You'll get over that. Hang it, I'm not the first man whose foot slipped. It isn't your funeral, anyway. Forget it."

The grumbling coarseness of this retort left her speechless. Benton got the fire going and went out. She saw him cross to the kitchen, and later she saw Katy John leave the camp with all her belongings in a bundle over her shoulder, trudging away to the camp of her people around the point.

Kipling's pregnant line shot across her mind:

"For the colonel's lady and Judy O'Grady are sisters under their skins."

"I wonder," she mused. "I wonder if we are? I wonder if that poor, little, brown-skinned fool isn't after all as much a victim as I am. She doesn't know better, maybe; but Charlie does, and he doesn't seem to care. It merely embarrasses him to be found out, that's all. It isn't right. It isn't fair, or decent, or anything. We're just for him to—to use."

She looked out along the shores piled high with broken ice and snow, through a misty air to distant mountains that lifted themselves imperiously aloof, white spires against the sky,—over a forest all draped in winter robes; shore, mountains, and forest alike were chill and hushed and desolate. The lake spread its forty-odd miles in a boomerang curve from Roaring Springs to Fort Douglas, a cold, lifeless gray. She sat a long time looking at that, and a dead weight seemed to settle upon her heart. For the second time that day she broke down. Not the shamed, indignant weeping of an hour earlier, but with the essence of all things forlorn and desolate in her choked sobs.

She did not hear Jack Fyfe come in. She did not dream he was there, until she felt his hand gently on her shoulder and looked up. And so deep was her despondency, so keen the unassuaged craving for some human sympathy, some measure of understanding, that she made no effort to remove his hand. She was in too deep a spiritual quagmire to refuse any sort of aid, too deeply moved to indulge in analytical self-fathoming. She had a dim sense of being oddly comforted by his presence, as if she, afloat on uncharted seas, saw suddenly near at hand a safe anchorage and welcoming hands. Afterward she recalled that. As it was, she looked up at Fyfe and hid her wet face in her hands again. He stood silent a few seconds. When he did speak there was a peculiar hesitation in his voice.

"What is it?" he said softly. "What's the trouble now?"

Briefly she told him, the barriers of her habitual reserve swept aside before the essentially human need to share a burden that has grown too great to bear alone.

"Oh, hell," Fyfe grunted, when she had finished. "This isn't any place for you at all."

He slid his arm across her shoulders and tilted her face with his other hand so that her eyes met his. And she felt no desire to draw away or any of that old instinct to be on her guard against him. For all she knew—indeed, by all she had been told—Jack Fyfe was tarred with the same stick as her brother, but she had no thought of resisting him, no feeling of repulsion.

"Will you marry me, Stella?" he asked evenly. "I can free you from this sort of thing forever."

"How can I?" she returned. "I don't want to marry anybody. I don't love you. I'm not even sure I like you. I'm too miserable to think, even. I'm afraid to take a step like that. I should think you would be too."

He shook his head.

"I've thought a lot about it lately," he said. "It hasn't occurred to me to be afraid of how it may turn out. Why borrow trouble when there's plenty at hand? I don't care whether you love me or not, right now. You couldn't possibly be any worse off as my wife, could you?"

"No," she admitted. "I don't see how I could."

"Take a chance then," he urged. "I'll make a fair bargain with you. I'll make life as pleasant for you as I can. You'll live pretty much as you've been brought up to live, so far as money goes. The rest we'll have to work out for ourselves. I won't ask you to pretend anything you don't feel. You'll play fair, because that's the way you're made,—unless I've sized you up wrong. It'll simply be a case of our adjusting ourselves, just as mating couples have been doing since the year one. You've everything to gain and nothing to lose."

"In some ways," she murmured.

"Every way," he insisted. "You aren't handicapped by caring for any other man."

"How do you know?" she asked.

"Just a hunch," Fyfe smiled. "If you did, he'd have beaten me to the rescue long ago—if he were the sort of man you could care for."

"No," she admitted. "There isn't any other man, but there might be. Think how terrible it would be if it happened—afterward."

Fyfe shrugged his shoulders.

"Sufficient unto the day," he said. "There is no string on either of us just now. We start even. That's good enough. Will you?"

"You have me at a disadvantage," she whispered. "You offer me a lot that I want, everything but a feeling I've somehow always believed ought to exist, ought to be mutual. Part of me wants to shut my eyes and jump. Part of me wants to hang back. I can't stand this thing I've got into and see no way of getting out of. Yet I dread starting a new train of wretchedness. I'm afraid—whichever way I turn."

Fyfe considered this a moment.

"Well," he said finally, "that's a rather unfortunate attitude. But I'm going into it with my eyes open. I know what I want. You'll be making a sort of experiment. Still, I advise you to make it. I think you'll be the better for making it. Come on. Say yes."

Stella looked up at him, then out over the banked snow, and all the dreary discomforts, the mean drudgery, the sordid shifts she had been put to for months rose up in disheartening phalanx. For that moment Jack Fyfe loomed like a tower of refuge. She trusted him now. She had a feeling that even if she grew to dislike him, she would still trust him. He would play fair. If he said he would do this or that, she could bank on it absolutely.

She turned and looked at him searchingly a long half-minute, wondering what really lay behind the blue eyes that met her own so steadfastly. He stood waiting patiently, outwardly impassive. But she could feel through the thin stuff of her dress a quiver in the fingers that rested on her shoulder, and that repressed sign of the man's pent-up feeling gave her an odd thrill, moved her strangely, swung the pendulum of her impulse.

"Yes," she said.

Fyfe bent a little lower.

"Listen," he said in characteristically blunt fashion. "You want to get away from here. There is no sense in our fussing or hesitating about what we're going to do, is there?"

"No, I suppose not," she agreed.

"I'll send the Panther down to the Springs for Lefty Howe's wife," he outlined his plans unhesitatingly. "She'll get up here this evening. To-morrow we will go down and take the train to Vancouver and be married. You have plenty of good clothes, good enough for Vancouver. I know,"—with a whimsical smile,—"because you had no chance to wear them out. Then we'll go somewhere, California, Florida, and come back to Roaring Lake in the spring. You'll have all the bad taste of this out of your mouth by that time."

Stella nodded acquiescence. Better to make the plunge boldly, since she had elected to make it.

"All right. I'm going to tell Benton," Fyfe said. "Good-by till to-morrow."

She stood up. He looked at her a long time earnestly, searchingly, one of her hands imprisoned tight between his two big palms. Then, before she was quite aware of his intention, he kissed her gently on the mouth, and was gone.

* * * * *

This turn of events left Benton dumbfounded, to use a trite but expressive phrase. He came in, apparently to look at Stella in amazed curiosity, for at first he had nothing to say. He sat down beside his makeshift desk and pawed over some papers, running the fingers of one hand through his thick brown hair.

"Well, Sis," he blurted out at last. "I suppose you know what you're doing?"

"I think so," Stella returned composedly.

"But why all this mad haste?" he asked. "If you're going to get married, why didn't you let me know, so I could give you some sort of decent send-off."

"Oh, thanks," she returned dryly. "I don't think that's necessary. Not at this stage of the game, as you occasionally remark."

He ruminated upon this a minute, flushing slightly.

"Well, I wish you luck," he said sincerely enough. "Though I can hardly realize this sudden move. You and Jack Fyfe may get on all right. He's a good sort—in his way."

"His way suits me," she said, spurred to the defensive by what she deemed a note of disparagement in his utterance. "If you have any objections or criticisms, you can save your breath—or address them direct to Mr. Fyfe."

"No, thank you," he grinned. "I don't care to get into any argument with him, especially as he's going to be my brother-in-law. Fyfe's all right. I didn't imagine he was the sort of man you'd fancy, that's all."

Stella refrained from any comment on this. She had no intention of admitting to Charlie that marriage with Jack Fyfe commended itself to her chiefly as an avenue of escape from a well-nigh intolerable condition which he himself had inflicted upon her. Her pride rose in arms against any such belittling admission. She admitted it frankly to herself,—and to Fyfe,—because Fyfe understood and was content with that understanding. She desired to forget that phase of the transaction. She told herself that she meant honestly to make the best of it.

Benton turned again to his papers. He did not broach the subject again until in the distance the squat hull of the Panther began to show on her return from the Springs. Then he came to where Stella was putting the last of her things into her trunk. He had some banknotes in one hand, and a check.

"Here's that ninety I borrowed, Stell," he said. "And a check for your back pay. Things have been sort of lean around here, maybe, but I still think it's a pity you couldn't have stuck it out till it came smoother. I hate to see you going away with a chronic grouch against me. I suppose I wouldn't even be a welcome guest at the wedding?"

"No," she said unforgivingly. "Some things are a little too—too recent."

"Oh," he replied casually enough, pausing in the doorway a second on his way out, "you'll get over that. You'll find that ordinary, everyday living isn't any kid-glove affair."

She sat on the closed lid of her trunk, looking at the check and money. Three hundred and sixty dollars, all told. A month ago that would have spelled freedom, a chance to try her luck in less desolate fields. Well, she tried to consider the thing philosophically; it was no use to bewail what might have been. In her hands now lay the sinews of a war she had forgone all need of waging. It did not occur to her to repudiate her bargain with Jack Fyfe. She had given her promise, and she considered she was bound, irrevocably. Indeed, for the moment, she was glad of that. She was worn out, all weary with unaccustomed stress of body and mind. To her, just then, rest seemed the sweetest boon in the world. Any port in a storm, expressed her mood. What came after was to be met as it came. She was too tired to anticipate.

It was a pale, weary-eyed young woman, dressed in the same plain tailored suit she had worn into the country, who was cuddled to Mrs. Howe's plump bosom when she went aboard the Panther for the first stage of her journey.

A slaty bank of cloud spread a somber film across the sky. When the Panther laid her ice-sheathed guard-rail against the Hot Springs wharf the sun was down. The lake spread gray and lifeless under a gray sky, and Stella Benton's spirits were steeped in that same dour color.



CHAPTER XII

AND SO THEY WERE MARRIED

Spring had waved her transforming wand over the lake region before the Fyfes came home again. All the low ground, the creeks and hollows and banks, were bright green with new-leaved birch and alder and maple. The air was full of those aromatic exudations the forest throws off when it is in the full tide of the growing time. Shores that Stella had last seen dismal and forlorn in the frost-fog, sheathed in ice, banked with deep snow, lay sparkling now in warm sunshine, under an unflecked arch of blue. All that was left of winter was the white cap on Mount Douglas, snow-filled chasms on distant, rocky peaks. Stella stood on the Hot Springs wharf looking out across the emerald deep of the lake, thinking soberly of the contrast.

Something, she reflected, some part of that desolate winter, must have seeped to the very roots of her being to produce the state of mind in which she embarked upon that matrimonial voyage. A little of it clung to her still. She could look back at those months of loneliness, of immeasurable toil and numberless indignities, without any qualms. There would be no repetition of that. The world at large would say she had done well. She herself in her most cynical moments could not deny that she had done well. Materially, life promised to be generous. She was married to a man who quietly but inexorably got what he wanted, and it was her good fortune that he wanted her to have the best of everything.

She saw him now coming from the hotel, and she regarded him thoughtfully, a powerful figure swinging along with light, effortless steps. He was back on his own ground, openly glad to be back. Yet she could not recall that he had ever shown himself at a disadvantage anywhere they had been together. He wore evening clothes when occasion required as unconcernedly as he wore mackinaws and calked boots among his loggers. She had not yet determined whether his equable poise arose from an unequivocal democracy of spirit, or from sheer egotism. At any rate, where she had set out with subtle misgivings, she had to admit that socially, at least, Jack Fyfe could play his hand at any turn of the game. Where or how he came by this faculty, she did not know. In fact, so far as Jack Fyfe's breeding and antecedents were concerned, she knew little more than before their marriage. He was not given to reminiscence. His people—distant relatives—lived in her own native state of Pennsylvania. He had an only sister who was now in South America with her husband, a civil engineer. Beyond that Fyfe did not go, and Stella made no attempt to pry up the lid of his past. She was not particularly curious.

Her clearest judgment of him was at first hand. He was a big, virile type of man, generous, considerate, so sure of himself that he could be tolerant of others. She could easily understand why Roaring Lake considered Jack Fyfe "square." The other tales of him that circulated there she doubted now. The fighting type he certainly was, aggressive in a clash, but if there were any downright coarseness in him, it had never manifested itself to her. She was not sorry she had married him. If they had not set out blind in a fog of sentiment, as he had once put it, nevertheless they got on. She did not love him,—not as she defined that magic word,—but she liked him, was mildly proud of him. When he kissed her, if there were no mad thrill in it, there was at least a passive contentment in having inspired that affection. For he left her in no doubt as to where he stood, not by what he said, but wholly by his actions.

He joined her now. The Panther, glossy black as a crow's wing with fresh paint, lay at the pier-end with their trunks aboard. Stella surveyed those marked with her initials, looking them over with a critical eye, when they reached the deck.

"How in the world did I ever manage to accumulate so much stuff, Jack?" she asked quizzically. "I didn't realize it. We might have been doing Europe with souvenir collecting our principal aim, by the amount of our baggage."

Fyfe smiled, without commenting. They sat on a trunk and watched Roaring Springs fall astern, dwindle to a line of white dots against the great green base of the mountain that rose behind it.

"It's good to get back here," he said at last. "To me, anyway. How about it, Stella? You haven't got so much of a grievance with the world in general as you had when we left, eh?"

"No, thank goodness," she responded fervently.

"You don't look as if you had," he observed, his eyes admiringly upon her.

Nor had she. There was a bloom on the soft contour of her cheek, a luminous gleam in her wide, gray eyes. All the ill wrought by months of drudging work and mental revolt had vanished. She was undeniably good to look at, a woman in full flower, round-bodied, deep-breasted, aglow with the unquenched fires of youth. She was aware that Jack Fyfe found her so and tolerably glad that he did so find her. She had revised a good many of her first groping estimates of him that winter. And when she looked over the port bow and saw in behind Halfway Point the huddled shacks of her brother's camp where so much had overtaken her, she experienced a swift rush of thankfulness that she was—as she was. She slid her gloved hand impulsively into Jack Fyfe's, and his strong fingers shut down on hers closely.

They sat silent until the camp lay abeam. About it there was every sign of activity. A chunky stern-wheeler, with blow-off valve hissing, stood by a boom of logs in the bay, and men were moving back and forth across the swifters, making all ready for a tow. Stella marked a new bunkhouse. Away back on the logging ground in a greater clearing she saw the separate smoke of two donkey engines. Another, a big roader, Fyfe explained, puffed at the water's edge. She could see a string of logs tearing down the skid-road.

"He's going pretty strong, that brother of yours," Fyfe remarked. "If he holds his gait, he'll be a big timberman before you know it."

"He'll make money, I imagine," Stella admitted, "but I don't know what good that will do him. He'll only want more. What is there about money-making that warps some men so, makes them so grossly self-centered? I'd pity any girl who married Charlie. He used to be rather wild at home, but I never dreamed any man could change so."

"You use the conventional measuring-stick on him," her husband answered, with that tolerance which so often surprised her. "Maybe his ways are pretty crude. But he's feverishly hewing a competence—which is what we're all after—out of pretty crude material. And he's just a kid, after all, with a kid's tendency to go to extremes now and then. I kinda like the beggar's ambition and energy."

"But he hasn't the least consideration for anybody or anything," Stella protested. "He rides rough-shod over every one. That isn't either right or decent."

"It's the only way some men can get to the top," Fyfe answered quietly. "They concentrate on the object to be attained. That's all that counts until they're in a secure position. Then, when they stop to draw their breath, sometimes they find they've done lots of things they wouldn't do again. You watch. By and by Charlie Benton will cease to have those violent reactions that offend you so. As it is—he's a youngster, bucking a big game. Life, when you have your own way to hew through it, with little besides your hands and brain for capital, is no silk-lined affair."

She fell into thought over this reply. Fyfe had echoed almost her brother's last words to her. And she wondered if Jack Fyfe had attained that degree of economic power which enabled him to spend several thousand dollars on a winter's pleasuring with her by the exercise of a strong man's prerogative of overriding the weak, bending them to his own inflexible purposes, ruthlessly turning everything to his own advantage? If women came under the same head! She recalled Katy John, and her face burned. Perhaps. But she could not put Jack Fyfe in her brother's category. He didn't fit. Deep in her heart there still lurked an abiding resentment against Charlie Benton for the restraint he had put upon her and the license he had arrogated to himself. She could not convince herself that the lapses of that winter were not part and parcel of her brother's philosophy of life, a coarse and material philosophy.

Presently they were drawing in to Cougar Point, with the weather-bleached buildings of Fyfe's camp showing now among the upspringing second-growth scrub. Fyfe went forward and spoke to the man at the wheel. The Panther swung offshore.

"Why are we going out again?" Stella asked.

"Oh, just for fun," Fyfe smiled.

He sat down beside her and slipped one arm around her waist. In a few minutes they cleared the point. Stella was looking away across the lake, at the deep cleft where Silver Creek split a mountain range in twain.

"Look around," said he, "and tell me what you think of the House of Fyfe."

There it stood, snow-white, broad-porched, a new house reared upon the old stone foundation she remembered. The noon sun struck flashing on the windows. About it spread the living green of the grassy square, behind that towered the massive, darker-hued background of the forest.

"Oh," she exclaimed. "What wizard of construction did the work. That was why you fussed so long over those plans in Los Angeles. I thought it was to be this summer or maybe next winter. I never dreamed you were having it built right away."

"Well, isn't it rather nice to come home to?" he observed.

"It's dear. A homey looking place," she answered. "A beautiful site, and the house fits,—that white and the red tiles. Is the big stone fireplace in the living room, Jack?"

"Yes, and one in pretty nearly every other room besides," he nodded. "Wood fires are cheerful."

The Panther turned her nose shoreward at Fyfe's word.

"I wondered about that foundation the first time I saw it," Stella confessed, "whether you built it, and why it was never finished. There was moss over the stones in places. And that lawn wasn't made in a single season. I know, because dad had a country place once, and he was raging around two or three summers because the land was so hard to get well-grassed."

"No, I didn't build the foundation or make the lawn," Fyfe told her. "I merely kept it in shape. A man named Hale owned the land that takes in the bay and the point when I first came to the lake. He was going to be married. I knew him pretty well. But it was tough going those days. He was in the hole on some of his timber, and he and his girl kept waiting. Meantime he cleared and graded that little hill, sowed it to grass, and laid the foundation. He was about to start building when he was killed. A falling tree caught him. I bought in his land and the timber limits that lie back of it. That's how the foundation came there."

"It's a wonder it didn't grow up wild," Stella mused. "How long ago was that?"

"About five years," Fyfe said. "I kept the grass trimmed. It didn't seem right to let the brush overrun it after the poor devil put that labor of love on it. It always seemed to me that it should be kept smooth and green, and that there should be a big, roomy bungalow there. You see my hunch was correct, too."

She looked up at him in some wonder. She hadn't accustomed herself to associating Jack Fyfe with actions based on pure sentiment. He was too intensely masculine, solid, practical, impassive. He did not seem to realize even that sentiment had influenced him in this. He discussed it too matter-of-factly for that. She wondered what became of the bride-to-be. But that Fyfe could not tell her.

"Hale showed me her picture once," he said, "but I never saw her. Oh, I suppose she's married some other fellow long ago. Hale was a good sort. He was out-lucked, that's all."

The Panther slid in to the float. Jack and Stella went ashore. Lefty Howe came down to meet them. Thirty-five or forty men were stringing away from the camp, back to their work in the woods. Some waved greeting to Jack Fyfe, and he waved back in the hail-fellow fashion of the camps.

"How's the frau, Lefty?" he inquired, after they had shaken hands.

"Fine. Down to Vancouver. Sister's sick," Howe answered laconically. "House's all shipshape. Wanta eat here, or up there?"

"Here at the camp, until we get straightened around," Fyfe responded. "Tell Pollock to have something for us in about half an hour. We'll go up and take a look."

Howe went in to convey this message, and the two set off up the path. A sudden spirit of impishness made Jack Fyfe sprint. Stella gathered up her skirt and raced after him, but a sudden shortness of breath overtook her, and she came panting to where Fyfe had stopped to wait.

"You'll have to climb hills and row and swim so you'll get some wind," Fyfe chuckled. "Too much easy living, lady."

She smiled without making any reply to this sally, and they entered the house—the House of Fyfe, that was to be her home.

If the exterior had pleased her, she went from room to room inside with growing amazement. Fyfe had finished it from basement to attic without a word to her that he had any such undertaking in hand. Yet there was scarcely a room in which she could not find the visible result of some expressed wish or desire. Often during the winter they had talked over the matter of furnishings, and she recalled how unconsciously she had been led to make suggestions which he had stored up and acted upon. For the rest she found her husband's taste beyond criticism. There were drapes and rugs and prints and odds and ends that any woman might be proud to have in her home.

"You're an amazing sort of a man, Jack," she said thoughtfully. "Is there anything you're not up to? Even a Chinese servant in the kitchen. It's perfect."

"I'm glad you like it," he said. "I hoped you would."

"Who wouldn't?" she cried impulsively. "I love pretty things. Wait till I get done rearranging."

They introduced themselves to the immobile-featured Celestial when they had jointly and severally inspected the house from top to bottom. Sam Foo gazed at them, listened to their account of themselves, and disappeared. He re-entered the room presently, bearing a package.

"Mist' Chol' Bentlee him leave foh yo'."

Stella looked at it. On the outer wrapping was written:

From C.A. Benton to Mrs. John Henderson Fyfe A Belated Wedding Gift

She cut the string, and delved into the cardboard box, and gasped. Out of a swathing of tissue paper her hands bared sundry small articles. A little cap and jacket of knitted silk—its double in fine, fleecy yarn—a long silk coat—a bonnet to match,—both daintily embroidered. Other things—a shoal of them—baby things. A grin struggled for lodgment on Fyfe's freckled countenance. His blue eyes twinkled.

"I suppose," he growled, "that's Charlie's idea of a joke, huh?"

Stella turned away from the tiny garments, one little, hood crumpled tight in her hand. She laid her hot face against his breast and her shoulders quivered. She was crying.

"Stella, Stella, what's the matter?" he whispered.

"It's no joke," she sobbed. "It's a—it's a reality."



CHAPTER XIII

IN WHICH EVENTS MARK TIME

From that day on Stella found in her hands the reins over a smooth, frictionless, well-ordered existence. Sam Foo proved himself such a domestic treasure as only the trained Oriental can be. When the labor of an eight-room dwelling proved a little too much for him, he urbanely said so. Thereupon, at Fyfe's suggestion, he imported a fellow countryman, another bland, silent-footed model of efficiency in personal service. Thereafter Stella's task of supervision proved a sinecure.

A week or so after their return, in sorting over some of her belongings, she came across the check Charlie had given her: that two hundred and seventy dollars which represented the only money she had ever earned in her life. She studied it a minute, then went out to where her husband sat perched on the verandah rail.

"You might cash this, Jack," she suggested.

He glanced at the slip.

"Better have it framed as a memento," he said, smiling. "You'll never earn two hundred odd dollars so hard again, I hope. No, I'd keep it, if I were you. If ever you should need it, it'll always be good—unless Charlie goes broke."

There never had been any question of money between them. From the day of their marriage Fyfe had made her a definite monthly allowance, a greater sum than she needed or spent.

"As a matter of fact," he went on, "I'm going to open an account in your name at the Royal Bank, so you can negotiate your own paper and pay your own bills by check."

She went in and put away the check. It was hers, earned, all too literally, in the sweat of her brow. For all that it represented she had given service threefold. If ever there came a time when that hunger for independence which had been fanned to a flame in her brother's kitchen should demand appeasement—she pulled herself up short when she found her mind running upon such an eventuality. Her future was ordered. She was married—to be a mother. Here lay her home. All about her ties were in process of formation, ties that with time would grow stronger than any shackles of steel, constraining her to walk in certain ways,—ways that were pleasant enough, certain of ease if not of definite purpose.

Yet now and then she found herself falling into fits of abstraction in which Roaring Lake and Jack Fyfe, all that meant anything to her now, faded into the background, and she saw herself playing a lone hand against the world, making her individual struggle to be something more than the petted companion of a dominant male and the mother of his children. She never quite lost sight of the fact that marriage had been the last resort, that in effect she had taken the avenue her personal charm afforded to escape drudgery and isolation. There was still deep-rooted in her a craving for something bigger than mere ease of living. She knew as well as she knew anything that in the natural evolution of things marriage and motherhood should have been the big thing in her life. And it was not. It was too incidental, too incomplete, too much like a mere breathing-place on life's highway. Sometimes she reasoned with herself bluntly, instead of dreaming, was driven to look facts in the eye because she did dream. Always she encountered the same obstacle, a feeling that she had been defrauded, robbed of something vital; she had forgone that wonderful, passionate drawing together which makes the separate lives of the man and woman who experiences it so fuse that in the truest sense of the word they become one.

Mostly she kept her mind from that disturbing introspection, because invariably it led her to vague dreaming of a future which she told herself—sometimes wistfully—could never be realized. She had shut the door on many things, it seemed to her now. But she had the sense to know that dwelling on what might have been only served to make her morbid, and did not in the least serve to alter the unalterable. She had chosen what seemed to her at the time the least of two evils, and she meant to abide steadfast by her choice.

Charlie Benton came to visit them. Strangely enough to Stella, who had never seen him on Roaring Lake, at least, dressed otherwise than as his loggers, he was sporting a natty gray suit, he was clean shaven, Oxford ties on his feet, a gentleman of leisure in his garb. If he had started on the down grade the previous winter, he bore no signs of it now, for he was the picture of ruddy vigor, clear-eyed, brown-skinned, alert, bubbling over with good spirits.

"Why, say, you look like a tourist," Fyfe remarked after an appraising glance.

"I'm making money, pulling ahead of the game, that's all," Benton retorted cheerfully. "I can afford to take a holiday now and then. I'm putting a million feet a month in the water. That's going some for small fry like me. Say, this house of yours is all to the good, Jack. It's got class, outside and in. Makes a man feel as if he had to live up to it, eh? Mackinaws and calked boots don't go with oriental rugs and oak floors."

"You should get a place like this as soon as possible then," Stella put in drily, "to keep you up to the mark, on edge aesthetically, one might put it."

"Not to say morally," Benton laughed. "Oh, maybe I'll get to it by and by, if the timber business holds up."

Later, when he and Stella were alone together, he said to her:

"You're lucky. You've got everything, and it comes without an effort. You sure showed good judgment when you picked Jack Fyfe. He's a thoroughbred."

"Oh, thank you," she returned, a touch of irony in her voice, a subtlety of inflection that went clean over Charlie's head.

He was full of inquiries about where they had been that winter, what they had done and seen. Also he brimmed over with his own affairs. He stayed overnight and went his way with a brotherly threat of making the Fyfe bungalow his headquarters whenever he felt like it.

"It's a touch of civilization that looks good to me," he declared. "You can put my private mark on one of those big leather chairs, Jack. I'm going to use it often. All you need to make this a social center is a good-looking girl or two—unmarried ones. You watch. When the summer flock comes to the lake, your place is going to be popular."

That observation verified Benton's shrewdness. The Fyfe bungalow did become popular. Two weeks after Charlie's visit, a lean, white cruiser, all brass and mahogany above her topsides, slid up to the float, and two women came at a dignified pace along the path to the house. Stella had met Linda Abbey once, reluctantly, under the circumstances, but it was different now—with the difference that money makes. She could play hostess against an effective background, and she did so graciously. Nor was her graciousness wholly assumed. After all, they were her kind of people: Linda, fair-haired, perfectly gowned, perfectly mannered, sweetly pretty; Mrs. Abbey, forty-odd and looking thirty-five, with that calm self-assurance which wealth and position confer upon those who hold it securely. Stella found them altogether to her liking. It pleased her, too, that Jack happened in to meet them. He was not a scintillating talker, yet she had noticed that when he had anything to say, he never failed to attract and hold attention. His quiet, impersonal manner never suggested stolidness. And she was too keen an observer to overlook the fact that from a purely physical standpoint Jack Fyfe made an impression always, particularly on women. Throughout that winter it had not disturbed her. It did not disturb her now, when she noticed Linda Abbey's gaze coming back to him with a veiled appraisal in her blue eyes that were so like Fyfe's own in their tendency to twinkle and gleam with no corresponding play of features.

"We'll expect to see a good deal of you this summer," Mrs. Abbey said cordially at leave-taking. "We have a few people up from town now and then to vary the monotony of feasting our souls on scenery. Sometimes we are quite a jolly crowd. Don't be formal. Drop in when you feel the inclination."

When Stella reminded Jack of this some time later, in a moment of boredom, he put the Panther at her disposal for the afternoon. But he would not go himself. He had opened up a new outlying camp, and he had directions to issue, work to lay out.

"You hold up the social end of the game," he laughed. "I'll hustle logs."

So Stella invaded the Abbey-Monohan precincts by herself and enjoyed it—for she met a houseful of young people from the coast, and in that light-hearted company she forgot for the time being that she was married and the responsible mistress of a house. Paul Abbey was there, but he had apparently forgotten or forgiven the blow she had once dealt his vanity. Paul, she reflected, was not the sort to mourn a lost love long.

She had the amused experience too of beholding Charlie Benton appear an hour or so before she departed and straightway monopolize Linda Abbey in his characteristically impetuous fashion. Charlie was no diplomat. He believed in driving straight to any goal he selected.

"So that's the reason for the outward metamorphosis," Stella reflected. "Well?"

Altogether she enjoyed the afternoon hugely. The only fly in her ointment was a greasy smudge bestowed upon her dress—a garment she prized highly—by some cordage coiled on the Panther's deck. The black tender had carried too many cargoes of loggers and logging supplies to be a fit conveyance for persons in party attire. She exhibited the soiled gown to Fyfe with due vexation.

"I hope you'll have somebody scrub down the Panther the next time I want to go anywhere in a decent dress," she said ruefully. "That'll never come out. And it's the prettiest thing I've got too."

"Ah, what's the odds?" Fyfe slipped one arm around her waist. "You can buy more dresses. Did you have a good time? That's the thing!"

That ruined gown, however, subsequently produced an able, forty-foot, cruising launch, powerfully engined, easy in a sea, and comfortably, even luxuriously fitted as to cabin. With that for their private use, the Panther was left to her appointed service, and in the new boat Fyfe and Stella spent many a day abroad on Roaring Lake. They fished together, explored nooks and bays up and down its forty miles of length, climbed hills together like the bear of the ancient rhyme, to see what they could see. And the Waterbug served to put them on intimate terms with their neighbors, particularly the Abbey crowd. The Abbeys took to them wholeheartedly. Fyfe himself was highly esteemed by the elder Abbey, largely, Stella suspected, for his power on Roaring Lake. Abbey pere had built up a big fortune out of timber. He respected any man who could follow the same path to success. Therefore he gave Fyfe double credit,—for making good, and for a personality that could not be overlooked. He told Stella that once; that is to say, he told her confidentially that her husband was a very "able" young man. Abbey senior was short and double-chinned and inclined to profuse perspiration if he moved in haste over any extended time. Paul promised to be like him, in that respect.

Summer slipped by. There were dances, informal little hops at the Abbey domicile, return engagements at the Fyfe bungalow, laughter and music and Japanese lanterns strung across the lawn. There was tea and tennis and murmuring rivers of small talk. And amid this Stella Fyfe flitted graciously, esteeming it her world, a fair measure of what the future might be. Viewed in that light, it seemed passable enough.

Later, when summer was on the wane, she withdrew from much of this activity, spending those days when she did not sit buried in a book out on the water with her husband. When October ushered in the first of the fall rains, they went to Vancouver and took apartments. In December her son was born.



CHAPTER XIV

A CLOSE CALL AND A NEW ACQUAINTANCE

With the recurrence of spring, Fyfe's household transferred itself to the Roaring Lake bungalow again. Stella found the change welcome, for Vancouver wearied her. It was a little too crude, too much as yet in the transitory stage, in that civic hobbledehoy period which overtakes every village that shoots up over-swiftly to a city's dimensions. They knew people, to be sure, for the Abbey influence would have opened the way for them into any circle. Stella had made many friends and pleasant acquaintances that summer on the lake, but part of that butterfly clique sought pleasanter winter grounds before she was fit for social activity. Apart from a few more or less formal receptions and an occasional auction party, she found it pleasanter to stay at home. Fyfe himself had spent only part of his time in town after their boy was born. He was extending his timber operations. What he did not put into words, but what Stella sensed because she experienced the same thing herself, was that town bored him to death,—such town existence as Vancouver afforded. Their first winter had been different, because they had sought places where there was manifold variety of life, color, amusement. She was longing for the wide reach of Roaring Lake, the immense amphitheater of the surrounding mountains, long before spring.

So she was quite as well pleased when a mild April saw them domiciled at home again. In addition to Sam Foo and Feng Shu, there was a nurse for Jack Junior. Stella did not suggest that; Fyfe insisted on it. He was quite proud of his boy, but he did not want her chained to her baby.

"If the added expense doesn't count, of course a nurse will mean a lot more personal freedom," Stella admitted. "You see, I haven't the least idea of your resources, Jack. All I know about it is that you allow me plenty of money for my individual expenses. And I notice we're acquiring a more expensive mode of living all the time."

"That's so," Fyfe responded. "I never have gone into any details of my business with you. No reason why you shouldn't know what limits there are to our income. You never happened to express any curiosity before. Operating as I did up till lately, the business netted anywhere from twelve to fifteen thousand a year. I'll double that this season. In fact, with the amount of standing timber I control, I could make it fifty thousand a year by expanding and speeding things up. I guess you needn't worry about an extra servant or two."

So, apart from voluntary service on behalf of Jack Junior, she was free as of old to order her days as she pleased. Yet that small morsel of humanity demanded much of her time, because she released through the maternal floodgates a part of that passionate longing to bestow love where her heart willed. Sometimes she took issue with herself over that wayward tendency. By all the rules of the game, she should have loved her husband. He was like a rock, solid, enduring, patient, kind, and generous. He stood to her in the most intimate relation that can exist between a man and a woman. But she never fooled herself; she never had so far as Jack Fyfe was concerned. She liked him, but that was all. He was good to her, and she was grateful.

Sometimes she had a dim sense that under his easy-going exterior lurked a capacity for tremendously passionate outbreak. If she had been compelled to modify her first impression of him as an arrogant, dominant sort of character, scarcely less rough than the brown firs out of which he was hewing a fortune, she knew likewise that she had never seen anything but the sunny side of him. He still puzzled her a little at times; there were odd flashes of depths she could not see into, a quality of unexpectedness in things he would do and say. Even so, granting that in him was embodied so much that other men she knew lacked, she did not love him; there were indeed times when she almost resented him.

Why, she could not perhaps have put into words. It seemed too fantastic for sober summing-up, when she tried. But lurking always in the background of her thoughts was the ghost of an unrealized dream, a nebulous vision which once served to thrill her in secret. It could never be anything but a vision, she believed now, and believing, regretted. The cold facts of her existence couldn't be daydreamed away. She was married, and marriage put a full stop to the potential adventuring of youth. Twenty and maidenhood lies at the opposite pole from twenty-four and matrimony. Stella subscribed to that. She took for her guiding-star—theoretically—the twin concepts of morality and duty as she had been taught to construe them. So she saw no loophole, and seeing none, felt cheated of something infinitely precious. Marriage and motherhood had not come to her as the fruits of love, as the passionately eager fulfilling of her destiny. It had been thrust upon her. She had accepted it as a last resort at a time when her powers of resistance to misfortune were at the ebb.

She knew that this sort of self-communing was a bad thing, that it was bound to sour the whole taste of life in her mouth. As much as possible she thrust aside those vague, repressed longings. Materially she had everything. If she had foregone that bargain with Jack Fyfe, God only knew what long-drawn agony of mind and body circumstances and Charlie Benton's subordination of her to his own ends might have inflicted upon her. That was the reverse of her shield, but one that grew dimmer as time passed. Mostly, she took life as she found it, concentrating upon Jack Junior, a sturdy boy with blue eyes like his father, and who grew steadily more adorable.

Nevertheless she had recurring periods when moodiness and ill-stifled discontent got hold of her. Sometimes she stole out along the cliffs to sit on a mossy boulder, staring with absent eyes at the distant hills. And sometimes she would slip out in a canoe, to lie rocking in the lake swell,—just dreaming, filled with a passive sort of regret. She could not change things now, but she could not help wishing she could.

Fyfe warned her once about getting offshore in the canoe. Roaring Lake, pent in the shape of a boomerang between two mountain ranges, was subject to squalls. Sudden bursts of wind would shoot down its length like blasts from some monster funnel. Stella knew that; she had seen the glassy surface torn into whitecaps in ten minutes, but she was not afraid of the lake nor the lake winds. She was hard and strong. The open, the clean mountain air, and a measure of activity, had built her up physically. She swam like a seal. Out in that sixteen-foot Peterboro she could detach herself from her world of reality, lie back on a cushion, and lose herself staring at the sky. She paid little heed to Fyfe's warning beyond a smiling assurance that she had no intention of courting a watery end.

So one day in mid-July she waved a farewell to Jack Junior, crowing in his nurse's lap on the bank, paddled out past the first point to the north, and pillowing her head on a cushioned thwart, gave herself up to dreamy contemplation on the sky. There was scarce a ripple on the lake. A faint breath of an offshore breeze fanned her, drifting the canoe at a snail's pace out from land. Stella luxuriated in the quiet afternoon. A party of campers cruising the lake had tarried at the bungalow till after midnight. Jack Fyfe had risen at dawn to depart for some distant logging point. Stella, once wakened, had risen and breakfasted with him. She was tired, drowsy, content to lie there in pure physical relaxation. Lying so, before she was aware of it, her eyes closed.

She wakened with a start at a cold touch of moisture on her face,—rain, great pattering drops. Overhead an ominously black cloud hid the face of the sun. The shore, when she looked, lay a mile and a half abeam. To the north and between her and the land's rocky line was a darkening of the lake's surface. Stella reached for her paddle. The black cloud let fall long, gray streamers of rain. There was scarcely a stirring of the air, but that did not deceive her. There was a growing chill, and there was that broken line sweeping down the lake. Behind that was wind, a summer gale, the black squall dreaded by the Siwashes.

She had to buck her way to shore through that. She drove hard on the paddle. She was not afraid, but there rose in her a peculiar tensed-up feeling. Ahead lay a ticklish bit of business. The sixteen-foot canoe dwarfed to pitiful dimensions in the face of that snarling line of wind-harried water. She could hear the distant murmur of it presently, and gusty puffs of wind began to strike her.

Then it swept up to her, a ripple, a chop, and very close behind that the short, steep, lake combers with a wind that blew off the tops as each wave-head broke in white, bubbling froth. Immediately she began to lose ground. She had expected that, and it did not alarm her. If she could keep the canoe bow on, there was an even chance that the squall would blow itself out in half an hour. But keeping the canoe bow on proved a task for stout arms. The wind would catch all that forward part which thrust clear as she topped a sea and twist it aside, tending always to throw her broadside into the trough. Spray began to splash aboard. The seas were so short and steep that the Peterboro would rise over the crest of a tall one and dip its bow deep in the next, or leap clear to strike with a slap that made Stella's heart jump. She had never undergone quite that rough and tumble experience in a small craft. She was being beaten farther out and down the lake, and her arms were growing tired. Nor was there any slackening of the wind.

The combined rain and slaps of spray soaked her thoroughly. A puddle gathered about her knees in the bilge, sloshing fore and aft as the craft pitched, killing the natural buoyancy of the canoe so that she dove harder. Stella took a chance, ceased paddling, and bailed with a small can. She got a tossing that made her head swim while she lay in the trough. And when she tried to head up into it again, one comber bigger than its fellows reared up and slapped a barrel of water inboard. The next wave swamped her.

Sunk to the clamps, Stella held fast to the topsides, crouching on her knees, immersed to the hips in water that struck a chill through her flesh. She had the wit to remember and act upon Jack Fyfe's coaching, namely, to sit tight and hang on. No sea that ever ran can sink a canoe. Wood is buoyant. So long as she could hold on, the submerged craft would keep her head and shoulders above water. But it was numbing cold. Fed by glacial streams, Roaring Lake is icy in hottest midsummer.

What with paddling and bailing and the excitement of the struggle, Stella had wasted no time gazing about for other boats. She knew that if any one at the camp saw her, rescue would be speedily effected. Now, holding fast and sitting quiet, she looked eagerly about as the swamped canoe rose loggily on each wave. Almost immediately she was heartened by seeing distinctly some sort of craft plunging through the blow. She had not long to wait after that, for the approaching launch was a lean-lined speeder, powerfully engined, and she was being forced. Stella supposed it was one of the Abbey runabouts. Even with her teeth chattering and numbness fastening itself upon her, she shivered at the chances the man was taking. It was no sea for a speed boat to smash into at thirty miles an hour. She saw it shoot off the top of one wave and disappear in a white burst of spray, slash through the next and bury itself deep again, flinging a foamy cloud far to port and starboard. Stella cried futilely to the man to slow down. She could hang on a long time yet, but her voice carried no distance.

After that she had not long to wait. In four minutes the runabout was within a hundred yards, open exhausts cracking like a machine gun. And then the very thing she expected and dreaded came about. Every moment she expected to see him drive bows under and go down. Here and there at intervals uplifted a comber taller than its fellows, standing, just as it broke, like a green wall. Into one such hoary-headed sea the white boat now drove like a lance. Stella saw the spray leap like a cascade, saw the solid green curl deep over the forward deck and engine hatch and smash the low windshield. She heard the glass crack. Immediately the roaring exhausts died. Amid the whistle of the wind and the murmur of broken water, the launch staggered like a drunken man, lurched off into the trough, deep down by the head with the weight of water she had taken.

The man in her stood up with hands cupped over his mouth.

"Can you hang on a while longer?" he shouted. "Till I can get my boat bailed?"

"I'm all right," she called back.

She saw him heave up the engine hatch. For a minute or two he bailed rapidly. Then he spun the engine, without result. He straightened up at last, stood irresolute a second, peeled off his coat.

The launch lay heavily in the trough. The canoe, rising and clinging on the crest of each wave, was carried forward a few feet at a time, taking the run of the sea faster than the disabled motorboat. So now only a hundred-odd feet separated them, but they could come no nearer, for the canoe was abeam and slowly drifting past.

Stella saw the man stoop and stand up with a coil of line in his hand. Then she gasped, for he stepped on the coaming and plunged overboard in a beautiful, arching dive. A second later his head showed glistening above the gray water, and he swam toward her with a slow, overhand stroke. It seemed an age—although the actual time was brief enough—before he reached her. She saw then that there was method in his madness, for the line strung out behind him, fast to a cleat on the launch. He laid hold of the canoe and rested a few seconds, panting, smiling broadly at her.

"Sorry that whopping wave put me out of commission," he said at last. "I'd have had you ashore by now. Hang on for a minute."

He made the line fast to a thwart near the bow. Holding fast with one hand, he drew the swamped canoe up to the launch. In that continuous roll it was no easy task to get Stella aboard, but they managed it, and presently she sat shivering in the cockpit, watching the man spill the water out of the Peterboro till it rode buoyantly again. Then he went to work at his engine methodically, wiping dry the ignition terminals, all the various connections where moisture could effect a short circuit. At the end of a few minutes, he turned the starting crank. The multiple cylinders fired with a roar.

He moved back behind the wrecked windshield where the steering gear stood.

"Well, Miss Ship-wrecked Mariner," said he lightly, "where do you wish to be landed?"

"Over there, if you please." Stella pointed to where the red roof of the bungalow stood out against the green. "I'm Mrs. Fyfe."

"Ah!" said he. An expression of veiled surprise flashed across his face. "Another potential romance strangled at birth. You know, I hoped you were some local maiden before whom I could pose as a heroic rescuer. Such is life. Odd, too. Linda Abbey—I'm the Monohan tail to the Abbey business kite, you see—impressed me as pilot for a spin this afternoon and backed out at the last moment. I think she smelled this blow. So I went out for a ride by myself. I was glowering at that new house through a glass when I spied you out in the thick of it."

He had the clutch in now, and the launch was cleaving the seas, even at half speed throwing out wide wings of spray. Some of this the wind brought across the cockpit. "Come up into this seat," Monohan commanded. "I don't suppose you can get any wetter, but if you put your feet through this bulkhead door, the heat from the engine will warm you. By Jove, you're fairly shivering."

"It's lucky for me you happened along," Stella remarked, when she was ensconced behind the bulkhead. "I was getting so cold. I don't know how much longer I could have stood it."

"Thank the good glasses that picked you out. You were only a speck on the water, you know, when I sighted you first."

He kept silent after that. All his faculties were centered on the seas ahead which rolled up before the sharp cutwater of the launch. He was making time and still trying to avoid boarding seas. When a big one lifted ahead, he slowed down. He kept one hand on the throttle control, whistling under his breath disconnected snatches of song. Stella studied his profile, clean-cut as a cameo and wholly pleasing. He was almost as big-bodied as Jack Fyfe, and full four inches taller. The wet shirt clinging close to his body outlined well-knit shoulders, ropy-muscled arms. He could easily have posed for a Viking, so strikingly blond was he, with fair, curly hair. She judged that he might be around thirty, yet his face was altogether boyish.

Sitting there beside him, shivering in her wet clothes, she found herself wondering what magnetic quality there could be about a man that focussed a woman's attention upon him whether she willed it or no. Why should she feel an oddly-disturbing thrill at the mere physical nearness of this fair-haired stranger? She did. There was no debating that. And she wondered—wondered if a bolt of that lightning she had dreaded ever since her marriage was about to strike her now. She hoped not. All her emotions had lain fallow. If Jack Fyfe had no power to stir her,—and she told herself Jack had so failed, without asking herself why,—then some other man might easily accomplish that, to her unutterable grief. She had told herself many a time that no more terrible plight could overtake her than to love and be loved and sit with hands folded, foregoing it all. She shrank from so tragic an evolution. It meant only pain, the ache of unfulfilled, unattainable desires. If, she reflected cynically, this man beside her stood for such a motif in her life, he might better have left her out in the swamped canoe.

While she sat there, drawn-faced with the cold, thinking rather amazedly these things which she told herself she had no right to think, the launch slipped into the quiet nook of Cougar Bay and slowed down to the float.

Monohan helped her out, threw off the canoe's painter, and climbed back into the launch.

"You're as wet as I am," Stella said. "Won't you come up to the house and get a change of clothes? I haven't even thanked you."

"Nothing to be thanked for," he smiled up at her. "Only please remember not to get offshore in a canoe again. I mightn't be handy the next time—and Roaring Lake's as fickle as your charming sex. All smiles one minute, storming the next. No, I won't stay this time, thanks. A little wet won't hurt me. I wasn't in the water long enough to get chilled, you know. I'll be home in half an hour. Run along and get dressed, Mrs. Fyfe, and drink something hot to drive that chill away. Good-by."

Stella went up to the house, her hand tingling with his parting grip. Over and above the peril she had escaped rose an uneasy vision of a greater peril to her peace of mind. The platitudes of soul-affinity, of irresistible magnetic attraction, of love that leaped full-blown into reality at the touch of a hand or the glance of an eye, she had always viewed with distrust, holding them the weaknesses of weak, volatile natures. But there was something about this man which had stirred her, nothing that he said or did, merely some elusive, personal attribute. She had never undergone any such experience, and she puzzled over it now. A chance stranger, and his touch could make her pulse leap. It filled her with astonished dismay.

Afterward, dry-clad and warm, sitting in her pet chair, Jack Junior cooing at her from a nest among cushions on the floor, the natural reaction set in, and she laughed at herself. When Fyfe came home, she told him lightly of her rescue.

He said nothing at first, only sat drumming on his chair-arm, his eyes steady on her.

"That might have cost you your life," he said at last. "Will you remember not to drift offshore again?"

"I rather think I shall," she responded. "It wasn't a pleasant experience."

"Monohan, eh?" he remarked after another interval. "So he's on Roaring Lake again."

"Do you know him?" she asked.

"Yes," he replied briefly.

For a minute or so longer he sat there, his face wearing its habitual impassiveness. Then he got up, kissed her with a queer sort of intensity, and went put. Stella gazed after him, mildly surprised. It wasn't quite in his usual manner.



CHAPTER XV

A RESURRECTION

It might have been a week or so later that Stella made a discovery which profoundly affected the whole current of her thought. The long twilight was just beginning. She was curled on the living-room floor, playing with the baby. Fyfe and Charlie Benton sat by a window, smoking, conversing, as they frequently did, upon certain phases of the timber industry. A draft from an open window fluttered some sheet music down off the piano rack, and Stella rescued it from Jack Junior's tiny, clawing hands. Some of the Abbeys had been there the evening before. One bit of music was a song Linda had tried to sing and given up because it soared above her vocal range. Stella rose to put up the music. Without any premeditated idea of playing, she sat down at the piano and began to run over the accompaniment. She could play passably.

"That doesn't seem so very hard," she thought aloud. Benton turned at sound of her words.

"Say, did you never get any part of your voice back, Stell?" he asked. "I never hear you try to sing."

"No," she answered. "I tried and tried long after you left home, but it was always the same old story. I haven't sung a note in five years."

"Linda fell down hard on that song last night," he went on. "There was a time when that wouldn't have been a starter for you, eh? Did you know Stella used to warble like a prima donna, Jack?"

Fyfe shook his head.

"Fact. The governor spent a pot of money cultivating her voice. It was some voice, too. She—"

He broke off to listen. Stella was humming the words of the song, her fingers picking at the melody instead of the accompaniment.

"Why, you can," Benton cried.

"Can what?" She turned on the stool.

"Sing, of course. You got that high trill that Linda had to screech through. You got it perfectly, without effort."

"I didn't," she returned. "Why, I wasn't singing, just humming it over."

"You let out a link or two on those high notes just the same, whether you knew you were doing it or not," her brother returned impatiently. "Go on. Turn yourself loose. Sing that song."

"Oh, I couldn't," Stella said ruefully. "I haven't tried for so long. It's no use. My voice always cracks, and I want to cry."

"Crack fiddlesticks!" Benton retorted. "I know what it used to be. Believe me, it sounded natural, even if you were just lilting. Here."

He came over to the piano and playfully edged her off the stool.

"I'm pretty rusty," he said. "But I can fake what I can't play of this. It's simple enough. You stand up there and sing."

She only stood looking at him.

"Go on," he commanded. "I believe you can sing anything. You have to show me, if you can't."

Stella fingered the sheets reluctantly. Then she drew a deep breath and began.

It was not a difficult selection, merely a bit from a current light opera, with a closing passage that ranged a trifle too high for the ordinary untrained voice to take with ease. Stella sang it effortlessly, the last high, trilling notes pouring out as sweet and clear as the carol of a lark. Benton struck the closing chord and looked up at her. Fyfe leaned forward in his chair. Jack Junior, among his pillows on the floor, waved his arms, kicking and gurgling.

"You did pretty well on that," Charlie remarked complacently. "Now sing something. Got any of your old pieces?"

"I wonder if I could?" Stella murmured. "I'm almost afraid to try."

She hurried away to some outlying part of the house, reappearing in a few minutes with a dog-eared bundle of sheets in her hand. From among these she selected three and set them on the rack.

Benton whistled when he glanced over the music.

"The Siren Song," he grunted. "What is it? something new? Lord, look at the scale. Looks like one of those screaming arias from the 'Flying Dutchman.' Some stunt."

"Marchand composed it for the express purpose of trying out voices," Stella said. "It is a stunt."

"You'll have to play your own accompaniment," Charlie grinned. "That's too much for me."

"Oh, just so you give me a little support here and there," Stella told him. "I can't sing sitting on a piano stool."

Benton made a face at the music and struck the keys.

It seemed to Stella nothing short of a miracle. She had been mute so long. She had almost forgotten what a tragedy losing her voice had been. And to find it again, to hear it ring like a trumpet. It did! It was too big for the room. She felt herself caught up in a triumphant ecstasy as she sang. She found herself blinking as the last note died away. Her brother twisted about on the piano stool, fumbling for a cigarette.

"And still they say they can't come back," he remarked at last. "Why, you're better than you ever were, Stella. You've got the old sweetness and flexibility that dad used to rave about. But your voice is bigger, somehow different. It gets under a man's skin."

She picked up the baby from the floor, began to play with him. She didn't want to talk. She wanted to think, to gloat over and hug to herself this miracle of her restored voice. She was very quiet, very much absorbed in her own reflections until it was time—very shortly—to put Jack Junior in his bed. That was a function she made wholly her own. The nurse might greet his waking whimper in the morning and minister to his wants throughout the day, but Stella "tucked him in" his crib every night. And after the blue eyes were closed, she sat there, very still, thinking. In a detached way she was conscious of hearing Charlie leave.

Later, when she was sitting beside her dressing table brushing her hair, Fyfe came in. He perched himself on the foot rail of the bed, looking silently at her. She had long grown used to that. It was a familiar trick of his.

"How did it happen that you've never tried your voice lately?" he asked after a time.

"I gave it up long ago," she said. "Didn't I ever tell you that I used to sing and lost my voice?"

"No," he answered. "Charlie did just now. You rather took my breath away. It's wonderful. You'd be a sensation in opera."

"I might have been," she corrected. "That was one of my little dreams. You don't know what a grief it was to me when I got over that throat trouble and found I couldn't sing. I used to try and try—and my voice would break every time. I lost all heart to try after a while. That was when I wanted to take up nursing, and they wouldn't let me. I haven't thought about singing for an age. I've crooned lullabies to Jacky without remembering that I once had volume enough to drown out an accompanist. Dad was awfully proud of my voice."

"You've reason to be proud of it now," Fyfe said slowly. "It's a voice in ten thousand. What are going to do with it?"

Stella drew the brush mechanically through her heavy hair. She had been asking herself that. What could she do? A long road and a hard one lay ahead of her or any other woman who essayed to make her voice the basis of a career. Over and above that she was not free to seek such a career. Fyfe himself knew that, and it irritated her that he should ask such a question. She swung about on him.

"Nothing," she said a trifle tartly. "How can I? Granting that my voice is worth the trouble, would you like me to go and study in the East or abroad? Would you be willing to bear the expense of such an undertaking? To have me leave Jack to nursemaids and you to your logs?"

"So that in the fullness of time I might secure a little reflected glory as the husband of Madame Fyfe, the famous soprano," he replied slowly. "Well, I can't say that's a particularly pleasing prospect."

"Then why ask me what I'm going to do with it?" she flung back impatiently. "It'll be an asset—like my looks—and—and—"

She dropped her face in her hands, choking back an involuntary sob. Fyfe crossed the room at a bound, put his arms around her.

"Stella, Stella!" he cried sharply. "Don't be a fool."

"D—don't be cross, Jack," she whispered. "Please. I'm sorry. I simply can't help it. You don't understand."

"Oh, don't I?" he said savagely. "I understand too well; that's the devil of it. But I suppose that's a woman's way,—to feed her soul with illusions, and let the realities go hang. Look here."

He caught her by the shoulders and pulled her to her feet, facing him. There was a fire in his eye, a hard shutting together of his lips that frightened her a little.

"Look here," he said roughly. "Take a brace, Stella. Do you realize what sort of a state of mind you're drifting into? You married me under more or less compulsion,—compulsion of circumstances,—and gradually you're beginning to get dissatisfied, to pity yourself. You'll precipitate things you maybe don't dream of now, if you keep on. Damn it, I didn't create the circumstances. I only showed you a way out. You took it. It satisfied you for a while; you can't deny it did. But it doesn't any more. You're nursing a lot of illusions, Stella, that are going to make your life full of misery."

"I'm not," she sobbed. "It's because I haven't any illusions that—that—Oh, what's the use of talking, Jack? I'm not complaining. I don't even know what gave me this black mood, just now. I suppose that queer miracle of my voice coming back upset me. I feel—well, as if I were a different person, somehow; as if I had forfeited any right to have it. Oh, it's silly, you'll say. But it's there. I can't help my feeling—or my lack of it."

Fyfe's face whitened a little. His hands dropped from her shoulders.

"Now you're talking to the point," he said quietly. "Especially that last. We've been married some little time now, and if anything, we're farther apart in the essentials of mating than we were at the beginning. You've committed yourself to an undertaking, yet more and more you encourage yourself to wish for the moon. If you don't stop dreaming and try real living, don't you see a lot of trouble ahead for yourself? It's simple. You're slowly hardening yourself against me, beginning to resent my being a factor in your life. It's only a matter of time, if you keep on, until your emotions center about some other man."

"Why do you talk like that?" she said bitterly. "Do you think I've got neither pride nor self-respect?"

"Yes. Both a-plenty," he answered. "But you're a woman, with a rather complex nature even for your sex. If your heart and your head ever clash over anything like that, you'll be in perfect hell until one or the other gets the upper hand. You're a thoroughbred, and high-strung as thoroughbreds are. It takes something besides three meals a day and plenty of good clothes to complete your existence. If I can't make it complete, some other man will make you think he can. Why don't you try? Haven't I got any possibilities as a lover? Can't you throw a little halo of romance about me, for your own sake—if not for mine?"