“It’s a pity everything’s gone to pot like that, Stell,” he said softly.  “I’ve grown a lot wiser in human ways the last two years.  You taught me a lot, and Jack a lot, and Linda the rest.  It seems a blamed shame you and Jack came to a fork in the road.  Oh, he never chirped.  I’ve just guessed it the last few weeks.  I owe him a lot that he’ll never let me pay back in anything but good will.  I hate to see him get the worst of it from every direction.  He grins and doesn’t say anything.  But I know it hurts.  There can’t be anything much wrong between you two.  Why don’t you forget your petty larceny troubles and start all over again?”

“I can’t,” she whispered.  “It wouldn’t work.  There’s too many scars.  Too much that’s hard to forget.”

“Well, you know about that better than I do,” Benton said thoughtfully.  “It all depends on how you feel.”

The poignant truth of that struck miserably home to her.  It was not a matter of reason or logic, of her making any sacrifice for her conscience sake.  It depended solely upon the existence of an emotion she could not definitely invoke.  She was torn by so many emotions, not one of which she could be sure was the vital, the necessary one.  Her heart did not cry out for Jack Fyfe, except in a pitying tenderness, as she used to feel for Jack Junior when he bumped and bruised himself.  She had felt that before and held it too weak a crutch to lean upon.

The nurse came in with a cup of broth for Benton, and Stella went away with a dumb ache in her breast, a leaden sinking of her spirits, and went out to sit on the porch steps.  The minutes piled into hours, and noon came, when Linda wakened.  Stella forced herself to swallow a cup of tea, to eat food; then she left Linda sitting with her husband and went back to the porch steps again.

As she sat there, a man dressed in the blue shirt and mackinaw trousers and high, calked boots of the logger turned in off the road, a burly woodsman that she recognized as one of Jack Fyfe’s crew.

“Well,” said he, “if it ain’t Mrs. Jack.  Say—­ah—­”

He broke off suddenly, a perplexed look on his face, an uneasiness, a hesitation in his manner.

“What is it, Barlow?” Stella asked kindly.  “How is everything up the lake?”

It was common enough in her experience, that temporary embarrassment of a logger before her.  She knew them for men with boyish souls, boyish instincts, rude simplicities of heart.  Long ago she had revised those first superficial estimates of them as gross, hulking brutes who worked hard and drank harder, coarsened and calloused by their occupation.  They had their weaknesses, but their virtues of abiding loyalty, their reckless generosity, their simple directness, were great indeed.  They took their lives in their hands on skid-road and spring-board, that such as she might flourish.  They did not understand that, but she did.

“What is it, Barlow?” she repeated.  “Have you just come down the lake?”