And she fled to her own room, stunned, half-frightened, wholly amazed at this outburst.  Her face was damp with his lip-pressure, damp and warm.  Her arms tingled with the grip of his.  The blood stood in her cheeks like a danger signal, flooding in hot, successive waves to the roots of her thick, brown hair.

“If I thought—­I could,” she whispered into her pillow, “I’d try.  But I daren’t.  I’m afraid.  It’s just a mood, I know it is.  I’ve had it before.  A—­ah!  I’m a spineless jellyfish, a weathercock that whirls to every emotional breeze.  And I won’t be.  I’ll stand on my own feet if I can—­so help me God, I will!”

CHAPTER XXII

THE FIRE BEHIND THE SMOKE

This is no intimate chronicle of Charlie Benton and Linda Abbey, save in so far as they naturally furnish a logical sequence in what transpired.  Therefore the details of their nuptials is of no particular concern.  They were wedded, ceremonially dined as befitted the occasion, and departed upon their hypothetical honeymoon, surreptitiously abbreviated from an extravagant swing over half of North America to seventy miles by rail and twenty by water,—­and a month of blissful seclusion, which suited those two far better than any amount of Pullman touring, besides leaving them money in pocket.

When they were gone, Stella caught the next boat for Seattle.  She had drawn fresh breath in the meantime, and while she felt tenderly, almost maternally, sorry for Jack Fyfe, she swung back to the old attitude.  Even granting, she argued, that she could muster courage to take up the mantle of wifehood where she laid it off, there was no surety that they could do more than compromise.  There was the stubborn fact that she had openly declared her love for another man, that by her act she had plunged her husband into far-reaching conflict.  Such a conflict existed.  She could put her finger on no concrete facts, but it was in the air.  She heard whispers of a battle between giants—­a financial duel to the death—­with all the odds against Jack Fyfe.

Win or lose, there would be scars.  And the struggle, if not of and by her deed, had at least sprung into malevolent activity through her.  Men, she told herself, do not forget these things; they rankle.  Jack Fyfe was only human.  No, Stella felt that they could only come safe to the old port by virtue of a passion that could match Fyfe’s own.  And she put that rather sadly beyond her, beyond the possibilities.  She had felt stirrings of it, but not to endure.  She was proud and sensitive and growing wise with bitterly accumulated experience.  It had to be all or nothing with them, a cleaving together complete enough to erase and forever obliterate all that had gone before.  And since she could not see that as a possibility, there was nothing to do but play the game according to the cards she held.  Of these the trump was work, the inner glow that comes of something worth while done toward a definite, purposeful end.  She took up her singing again with a distinct relief.