Stella’s hands tightened on the crib rail.  For an instant her heart stood still.  A wholly unreasoning blaze of anger seized her.  But she controlled that.  Pride forbade her betraying herself.

“What a perfectly ridiculous question,” she managed to reply.

He looked at her keenly.

“Because, if you have—­well, you might be perfectly innocent in the matter and still get in bad,” he continued evenly.  “I’d like to put a bug in your ear.”

She bent over Jack Junior, striving to inject an amused note into her reply.

“Don’t be so absurd, Charlie.”

“Oh, well, I suppose it is.  Only, darn it, I’ve seen him look at you in a way—­Pouf!  I was going to tell you something.  Maybe Jack has—­only he’s such a close-mouthed beggar.  I’m not very anxious to peddle things.”  Benton turned again.  “I guess you don’t need any coaching from me, anyhow.”

He walked out.  Stella stared after him, her eyes blazing, hands clenched into hard-knuckled little fists.  She could have struck him.

And still she wondered over and over again, burning with a consuming fire to know what that “something” was which he had to tell.  All the slumbering devils of a stifled passion awoke to rend her, to make her rage against the coil in which she was involved.  She despised herself for the weakness of unwise loving, even while she ached to sweep away the barriers that stood between her and love.  Mingled with that there whispered an intuition of disaster to come, of destiny shaping to peculiar ends.  In Monohan’s establishing himself on Roaring Lake she sensed something more than an industrial shift.  In his continued presence there she saw incalculable sources of trouble.  She stood leaning over the bed rail, staring wistfully at her boy for a few minutes.  When she faced the mirror in her room, she was startled at the look in her eyes, the nervous twitch of her lips.  There was a physical ache in her breast.

“You’re a fool, a fool,” she whispered to her image.  “Where’s your will, Stella Fyfe?  Borrow a little of your husband’s backbone.  Presently—­presently it won’t matter.”

One can club a too assertive ego into insensibility.  A man may smile and smile and be a villain still, as the old saying has it, and so may a woman smile and smile when her heart is tortured, when every nerve in her is strained to the snapping point.  Stella went back to the living room and sang for them until it was time to go to bed.

The Aldens went first, then Charlie.  Stella left her door ajar.  An hour afterward, when Fyfe came down the hall, she rose.  It had been her purpose to call him in, to ask him to explain that which her brother had hinted he could explain, what prior antagonism lay between him and Monohan, what that “something” about Monohan was which differentiated him from other men where she was concerned.  Instead she shut the door, slid the bolt home, and huddled in a chair with her face in her hands.