mit
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 admi