“In that case, you should be able to hire a real cook,” she suggested, a spice of malice in her tone.

“I sure will, when it begins to come right,” he promised largely.  “And I’ll give you a soft job keeping books then.  Well, I’ll lend you a hand for to-night.  Where’s the Siwash maiden?”

“Over at the camp; there she comes now,” Stella replied.  “Will you start a fire, Charlie, while I change my dress?”

“You look like a peach in that thing.”  He stood off a pace to admire.  “You’re some dame, Stell, when you get on your glad rags.”

She frowned at her image in the glass behind the closed door of her room as she set about unfastening the linen dress she had worn that afternoon.  Deep in her trunk, along with much other unused finery, it had reposed all summer.  That ingrained instinct to be admired, to be garbed fittingly and well, came back to her as soon as she was rested.  And though there were none but squirrels and bluejays and occasionally Katy John to cast admiring eyes upon her, it had pleased her for a week to wear her best, and wander about the beaches and among the dusky trunks of giant fir, a picture of blooming, well-groomed womanhood.  She took off the dress and threw it on the bed with a resentful rush of feeling.  The treadmill gaped for her again.  But not for long.  She was through with that.  She was glad that Charlie’s prospects pleased him.  He could not call on her to help him out of a hole now.  She would tell him her decision to-night.  And as soon as he could get a cook to fill her place, then good-by to Roaring Lake, good-by to kitchen smells and flies and sixteen hours a day over a hot stove.

She wondered why such a loathing of the work afflicted her; if all who earned their bread in the sweat of their brow were ridden with that feeling,—­woodsmen, cooks, chauffeurs, the slaves of personal service and the great industrial mills alike?  Her heart went out to them if they were.  But she was quite sure that work could be otherwise than repellent, enslaving.  She recalled that cooks and maids had worked in her father’s house with no sign of the revolt that now assailed her.  But it seemed to her that their tasks had been light compared with the job of cooking in Charlie Benton’s camp.

Curiously enough, while she changed her clothes, her thoughts a jumble of present things she disliked and the unknown that she would have to face alone in Vancouver, she found her mind turning on Jack Fyfe.  During his three weeks’ stay, they had progressed less in the direction of acquaintances than she and Paul Abbey had done in two meetings.  Fyfe talked to her now and then briefly, but he looked at her more than he talked.  Where his searching gaze disturbed, his speech soothed, it was so coolly impersonal.  That, she deemed, was merely another of his odd contradictions.  He was contradictory.  Stella classified Jack Fyfe as a creature of unrestrained passions.  She recognized,