Stella smiled.

“Under certain circumstances, appearances do count then, in this country,” she remarked.  “Has your Mr. Abbey got a young and be-yutiful sister?”

“He has, but that’s got nothing to do with it,” Charlie retorted.  “Paul’s all right himself.  But their gait isn’t mine—­not yet.  Here, you take the wheel a minute.  I want to smoke.  I don’t suppose you ever helmed a forty-footer, but you’ll never learn younger.”

She took the wheel and Charlie stood by, directing her.  In twenty minutes they were out where the run of the sea from the south had a fair sweep.  The wind was whistling now.  All the roughened surface was spotted with whitecaps.  The Chickamin would hang on the crest of a wave and shoot forward like a racer, her wheel humming, and again the roller would run out from under her, and she would labor heavily in the trough.

It began to grow insufferably hot in the pilot house.  The wind drove with them, pressing the heat from the boiler and fire box into the forward portion of the boat, where Stella stood at the wheel.  There were puffs of smoke when Davis opened the fire box to ply it with fuel.  All the sour smells that rose from an unclean bilge eddied about them.  The heat and the smell and the surging motion began to nauseate Stella.

“I must get outside where I can breathe,” she gasped, at length.  “It’s suffocating.  I don’t see how you stand it.”

“It does get stuffy in here when we run with the wind,” Benton admitted.  “Cuts off our ventilation.  I’m used to it.  Crawl out the window and sit on the forward deck.  Don’t try to get aft.  You might slip off, the way she’s lurching.”

Curled in the hollow of a faked-down hawser with the clean air fanning her, Stella recovered herself.  The giddiness left her.  She pitied Sam Davis back in that stinking hole beside the fire box.  But she supposed he, like her brother, was “used to it.”  Apparently one could get used to anything, if she could judge by the amazing change in Charlie.

Far ahead loomed a ridge running down to the lake shore and cutting off in a bold promontory.  That was Halfway Point, Charlie had told her, and under its shadow lay his camp.  Without any previous knowledge of camps, she was approaching this one with less eager anticipation than when she began her long journey.  She began to fear that it might be totally unlike anything she had been able to imagine, disagreeably so.  Charlie, she decided, had grown hard and coarsened in the evolution of his ambition to get on, to make his pile.  She was but four years younger than he, and she had always thought of herself as being older and wiser and steadier.  She had conceived the idea that her presence would have a good influence on him, that they would pull together—­now that there were but the two of them.  But four hours in his company had dispelled that illusion.  She had the wit to perceive that Charlie Benton had emerged from the chrysalis stage, that he had the will and the ability to mold his life after his elected fashion, and that her coming was a relatively unimportant incident.