For the crest of this little hillock had been cleared and graded level and planted to grass over an area four hundred feet square.  It was trimmed like a lawn, and in the center of this vivid green block stood an unfinished house foundation of gray stone.  No stick of timber, no board or any material for further building lay in sight.  The thing stood as if that were to be all.  And it was not a new undertaking temporarily delayed.  There was moss creeping over the thick stone wall, she discovered when she walked over it.  Whoever had laid that foundation had done it many a moon before.  Yet the sward about was kept as if a gardener had it in charge.

A noble stretch of lake and mountain spread out before her gaze.  Straight across the lake two deep clefts in the eastern range opened on the water, five miles apart.  She could see the white ribbon of foaming cascades in each.  Between lifted a great mountain, and on the lakeward slope of this stood a terrible scar of a slide, yellow and brown, rising two thousand feet from the shore.  A vaporous wisp of cloud hung along the top of the slide, and above this aerial banner a snow-capped pinnacle thrust itself high into the infinite blue.

“What an outlook,” she said, barely conscious that she spoke aloud.  “Why do these people build their houses in the bush, when they could live in the open and have something like this to look at.  They would, if they had any sense of beauty.”

“Sure they haven’t?  Some of them might have, you know, without being able to gratify it.”

She started, to find Jack Fyfe almost at her elbow, the gleam of a quizzical smile lighting his face.

“I daresay that might be true,” she admitted.

Fyfe’s gaze turned from her to the huge sweep of lake and mountain chain.  She saw that he was outfitted for fishing, creel on his shoulder, unjointed rod in one hand.  By means of his rubber-soled waders he had come upon her noiselessly.

“It’s truer than you think, maybe,” he said at length.  “You don’t want to come along and take a lesson in catching rainbows, I suppose?”

“Not this time, thanks,” she shook her head.

“I want to get enough for supper, so I’d better be at it,” he remarked.  “Sometimes they come pretty slow.  If you should want to go up and watch the boys work, that trail will take you there.”

He went off across the grassy level and plunged into the deep timber that rose like a wall beyond.  Stella looked after.

“It is certainly odd,” she reflected with some irritation, “how that man affects me.  I don’t think a woman could ever be just friends with him.  She’d either like him a lot or dislike him intensely.  He isn’t anything but a logger, and yet he has a presence like one of the lords of creation.  Funny.”

Then she went back to the house to converse upon domestic matters with Mrs. Howe until the shrilling of the donkey whistle brought forty-odd lumberjacks swinging down the trail.