He sent the lightly built craft easily through the water with regular, effortless strokes.  Stella sat in the stern, facing him.  Out past the north horn of the bay, she broke the silence that had fallen between them.

“Why did you make a point of coming for me?” she asked bluntly.

Fyfe rested on his oars a moment, looking at her in his direct, unembarrassed way.

“I wintered once on the Stickine,” he said.  “My partner pulled out before Christmas and never came back.  It was the first time I’d ever been alone in my life.  I wasn’t a much older hand in the country than you are.  Four months without hearing the sound of a human voice.  Stark alone.  I got so I talked to myself out loud before spring.  So I thought—­well, I thought I’d come and bring you over to see Mrs. Howe.”

Stella sat gazing at the slow moving panorama of the lake shore, her chin in her hand.

“Thank you,” she said at last, and very gently.

Fyfe looked at her a minute or more, a queer, half-amused expression creeping into his eyes.

“Well,” he said finally, “I might as well tell the whole truth.  I’ve been thinking about you quite a lot lately, Miss Stella Benton, or I wouldn’t have thought about you getting lonesome.”

He smiled ever so faintly, a mere movement of the corners of his mouth, at the pink flush which rose quickly in her cheeks, and then resumed his steady pull at the oars.

Except for a greater number of board shacks and a larger area of stump and top-littered waste immediately behind it, Fyfe’s headquarters, outwardly, at least, differed little from her brother’s camp.  Jack led her to a long, log structure with a shingle roof, which from its more substantial appearance she judged to be his personal domicile.  A plump, smiling woman of forty greeted her on the threshold.  Once within, Stella perceived that there was in fact considerable difference in Mr. Fyfe’s habitation.  There was a great stone fireplace, before which big easy-chairs invited restful lounging.  The floor was overlaid with thick rugs which deadened her footfalls.  With no pretense of ornamental decoration, the room held an air of homely comfort.

“Come in here and lay off your things,” Mrs. Howe beamed on her.  “If I’d ‘a’ known you were livin’ so close, we’d have been acquainted a week ago; though I ain’t got rightly settled here myself.  My land, these men are such clams.  I never knowed till this mornin’ there was any white woman at this end of the lake besides myself.”

She showed Stella into a bedroom.  It boasted an enamel washstand with taps which yielded hot and cold water, neatly curtained windows, and a deep-seated Morris chair.  Certainly Fyfe’s household accommodation was far superior to Charlie Benton’s.  Stella expected the man’s home to be rough and ready like himself, and in a measure it was, but a comfortable sort of rough and readiness.  She took off her hat and had a critical survey of herself in a mirror, after which she had just time to brush her hair before answering Mrs. Howe’s call to a “cup of tea.”