Fyfe stood aside for a minute.  Then he came up behind her and stood resting one hand on the back of her chair.

“Stella.”

“Yes.”

“I got word from my sister and her husband in this morning’s mail.  They will very likely be here next week for a three days’ stay.  Brace up.  Let’s try and keep our skeleton from rattling while they’re here.  Will you?”

“All right, Jack.  I’ll try.”

He patted her tousled hair lightly and left the room.  Stella looked after him with a surge of mixed feeling.  She told herself she hated him and his dominant will that always beat her own down; she hated him for his amazing strength and for his unvarying sureness of himself.  And in the same breath she found herself wondering if,—­with their status reversed,—­Walter Monohan would be as patient, as gentle, as self-controlled with a wife who openly acknowledged her affection for another man.  And still her heart cried out for Monohan.  She flared hot against the disparaging note, the unconcealed contempt Fyfe seemed to have for him.

Yet in spite of her eager defence of him, there was something ugly about that clash with Fyfe in the edge of the woods, something that jarred.  It wasn’t spontaneous.  She could not understand that tigerish onslaught of Monohan’s.  It was more the action she would have expected from her husband.

It puzzled her, grieved her, added a little to the sorrowful weight that settled upon her.  They were turbulent spirits both.  The matter might not end there.

In the next ten days three separate incidents, each isolated and relatively unimportant, gave Stella food for much puzzled thought.

The first was a remark of Fyfe’s sister in the first hours of their acquaintance.  Mrs. Henry Alden could never have denied blood kinship with Jack Fyfe.  She had the same wide, good-humored mouth, the blue eyes that always seemed to be on the verge of twinkling, and the same fair, freckled skin.  Her characteristics of speech resembled his.  She was direct, bluntly so, and she was not much given to small talk.  Fyfe and Stella met the Aldens at Roaring Springs with the Waterbug.  Alden proved a genial sort of man past forty, a big, loose-jointed individual whose outward appearance gave no indication of what he was professionally,—­a civil engineer with a reputation that promised to spread beyond his native States.

“You don’t look much different, Jack,” his sister observed critically, as the Waterbug backed away from the wharf in a fine drizzle of rain.  “Except that as you grow older, you more and more resemble the pater.  Has matrimony toned him down, my dear?” she turned to Stella.  “The last time I saw him he had a black eye!”

Fyfe did not give her a chance to answer.

“Be a little more diplomatic, Dolly,” he smiled.  “Mrs. Jack doesn’t realize what a rowdy I used to be.  I’ve reformed.”

“Ah,” Mrs. Alden chuckled, “I have a vision of you growing meek and mild.”