The cup of tea resolved itself into a well-cooked and well-served meal, with china and linen and other unexpected table accessories which agreeably surprised, her.  Inevitably she made comparisons, somewhat tinctured with natural envy.  If Charlie would fix his place with a few such household luxuries, life in their camp would be more nearly bearable, despite the long hours of disagreeable work.  As it was—­well, the unrelieved discomforts were beginning to warp her out-look on everything.

Fyfe maintained his habitual sparsity of words while they ate the food Mrs. Howe brought on a tray hot from the cook’s outlying domain.  When they finished, he rose, took up his hat and helped himself to a handful of cigars from a box on the fireplace mantel.

“I guess you’ll be able to put in the time, all right,” he remarked.  “Make yourself at home.  If you take a notion to read, there’s a lot of books and magazines in my room.  Mrs. Howe’ll show you.”

He walked out.  Stella was conscious of a distinct relief when he was gone.  She had somehow experienced a recurrence of that peculiar feeling of needing to be on her guard, as if there were some curious, latent antagonism between them.  She puzzled over that a little.  She had never felt that way about Paul Abbey, for instance, or indeed toward any man she had ever known.  Fyfe’s more or less ambiguous remark in the boat had helped to arouse it again.  His manner of saying that he had “thought a lot about her” conveyed more than the mere words.  She could quite conceive of the Jack Fyfe type carrying things with a high hand where a woman was concerned.  He had that reputation in all his other dealings.  He was aggressive.  He could drink any logger in the big firs off his feet.  He had an uncanny luck at cards.  Somehow or other in every undertaking Jack Fyfe always came out on top, so the tale ran.  There must be, she reasoned, a wide streak of the brute in such a man.  It was no gratification to her vanity to have him admire her.  It did not dawn upon her that so far she had never got over being a little afraid of him, much less to ask herself why she should be afraid of him.

But she did not spend much time puzzling over Jack Fyfe.  Once out of her sight she forgot him.  It was balm to her lonely soul to have some one of her own sex for company.  What Mrs. Howe lacked in the higher culture she made up in homely perception and unassuming kindliness.  Her husband was Fyfe’s foreman.  She herself was not a permanent fixture in the camp.  They had a cottage at Roaring Springs, where she spent most of the time, so that their three children could be in school.

“I was up here all through vacation,” she told Stella.  “But Lefty he got to howlin’ about bein’ left alone shortly after school started again, so I got my sister to look after the kids for a spell, while I stay.  I’ll be goin’ down about the time Mr. Benton’s through here.”

Stella eventually went out to take a look around the camp.  A hard-beaten path led off toward where rose the distant sounds of logging work, the ponderous crash of trees, and the puff of the donkeys.  She followed that a little way and presently came to a knoll some three hundred yards above the beach.  There she paused to look and wonder curiously.