“Linda is troubled by a belief that upon small pretext they would be very nasty, and she naturally doesn’t want any friction with her folks.  They have certain vague but highly material ambitions for her matrimonially, which she, a very sensible girl, doesn’t subscribe to.  She’s a very shrewd and practical young person, for all her whole-hearted passion for your brother.  I rather think she pretty clearly guesses the breach in our rampart—­not the original mistake in our over-hasty plunge—­but the wedge that divided us for good.  If she does, and I’m quite sure she does, she is certainly good stuff, because she is most loyally your champion.  I say that because Charlie had a tendency this spring to carp at your desertion of Roaring Lake.  Things aren’t going any too good with us, one way and another, and of course he, not knowing the real reason of your absence, couldn’t understand why you stay away.  I had to squelch him, and Linda abetted me successfully.  However, that’s beside the point.  I hope I haven’t irritated you.  I’m such a dumb sort of brute generally.  I don’t know what imp of prolixity got into my pen.  I’ve got it all off my chest now, or pretty near.

    “J.H.F.”

Stella sat thoughtfully gazing at the letter for a long time.

“I wonder?” she said aloud, and the sound of her own voice galvanized her into action.  She put on a coat and went out into the mellow spring sunshine, and walked till the aimless straying of her feet carried her to a little park that overlooked the far reach of the Sound and gave westward on the snowy Olympics, thrusting hoary and aloof to a perfect sky, like their brother peaks that ringed Roaring Lake.  And all the time her mind kept turning on a question whose asking was rooted neither in fact nor necessity, an inquiry born of a sentiment she had never expected to feel.

Should she go back to Jack Fyfe?

She shook her head impatiently when she faced that squarely.  Why tread the same bitter road again?  But she put that self-interested phase of it aside and asked herself candidly if she could go back and take up the old threads where they had been broken off and make life run smoothly along the old, quiet channels?  She was as sure as she was sure of the breath she drew that Fyfe wanted her, that he longed for and would welcome her.  But she was equally sure that the old illusions would never serve.  She couldn’t even make him happy, much less herself.  Monohan—­well, Monohan was a dead issue.  He had come to the Charteris to see her, all smiles and eagerness.  She had been able to look at him and through him—­and cut him dead—­and do it without a single flutter of her heart.