Benton crossed the room and threw open another door.

“Here’s a nook I fixed up for you, Stella,” he said briskly.  “It isn’t very fancy, but it’s the best I could do just now.”

She followed him in silently.  He set her two bags on the floor and turned to go.  Then some impulse moved him to turn back, and he put both hands on her shoulders and kissed her gently.

“You’re home, anyway,” he said.  “That’s something, if it isn’t what you’re used to.  Try to overlook the crudities.  We’ll have supper as soon as you feel like it.”

He went out, closing the door behind him.

Miss Estella Benton stood in the middle of the room fighting against a swift heart-sinking, a terrible depression that strove to master her.

“Good Lord in Heaven,” she muttered at last.  “What a place to be marooned in.  It’s—­it’s simply impossible.”

Her gaze roved about the room.  A square box, neither more nor less, fourteen by fourteen feet of bare board wall, unpainted and unpapered.  There was an iron bed, a willow rocker, and a rude closet for clothes in one corner.  A duplicate of the department-store bargain rug in the other room lay on the floor.  On an upturned box stood an enamel pitcher and a tin washbasin.  That was all.

She sat down on the bed and viewed it forlornly.  A wave of sickening rebellion against everything swept over her.  To herself she seemed as irrevocably alone as if she had been lost in the depths of the dark timber that rose on every hand.  And sitting there she heard at length the voices of men.  Looking out through a window curtained with cheesecloth she saw her brother’s logging gang swing past, stout woodsmen all, big men, tall men, short-bodied men with thick necks and shoulders, sunburned, all grimy with the sweat of their labors, carrying themselves with a free and reckless swing, the doubles in type of that roistering crew she had seen embark on Jack Fyfe’s boat.

In so far as she had taken note of those who labored with their hands in the region of her birth, she had seen few like these.  The chauffeur, the footman, the street cleaner, the factory workers—­they were all different.  They lacked something,—­perhaps nothing in the way of physical excellence; but these men betrayed in every movement a subtle difference that she could not define.  Her nearest approximation and the first attempt she made at analysis was that they looked like pirates.  They were bold men and strong; that was written in their faces and the swing of them as they walked.  And they served the very excellent purpose of taking her mind off herself for the time being.

She watched them cluster by a bench before the cookhouse, dabble their faces and hands in washbasins, scrub themselves promiscuously on towels, sometimes one at each end of a single piece of cloth, hauling it back and forth in rude play.

All about that cookhouse dooryard spread a confusion of empty tin cans, gaudily labeled, containers of corn and peas and tomatoes.  Dishwater and refuse, chips, scraps, all the refuse of the camp was scattered there in unlovely array.