To this p.r.o.nouncement 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 circ.u.mstances.

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 d.a.m.ned 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 pa.s.sion and the workings of pa.s.sion 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-cla.s.s theory for its wives and daughters and sisters--with an eye consistently blind to the concealed lapses of its men.

Stella Benton pa.s.sed 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 coa.r.s.eness 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 embarra.s.ses 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 sh.o.r.es 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; sh.o.r.e, 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 una.s.suaged 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 a.n.a.lytical 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, h.e.l.l," 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 att.i.tude. 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 impa.s.sive. 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.