Stella looked up at him, then out over the banked snow, and all the dreary discomforts, the mean drudgery, the sordid shifts she had been put to for months rose up in disheartening phalanx.  For that moment Jack Fyfe loomed like a tower of refuge.  She trusted him now.  She had a feeling that even if she grew to dislike him, she would still trust him.  He would play fair.  If he said he would do this or that, she could bank on it absolutely.

She turned and looked at him searchingly a long half-minute, wondering what really lay behind the blue eyes that met her own so steadfastly.  He stood waiting patiently, outwardly impassive.  But she could feel through the thin stuff of her dress a quiver in the fingers that rested on her shoulder, and that repressed sign of the man’s pent-up feeling gave her an odd thrill, moved her strangely, swung the pendulum of her impulse.

“Yes,” she said.

Fyfe bent a little lower.

“Listen,” he said in characteristically blunt fashion.  “You want to get away from here.  There is no sense in our fussing or hesitating about what we’re going to do, is there?”

“No, I suppose not,” she agreed.

“I’ll send the Panther down to the Springs for Lefty Howe’s wife,” he outlined his plans unhesitatingly.  “She’ll get up here this evening.  To-morrow we will go down and take the train to Vancouver and be married.  You have plenty of good clothes, good enough for Vancouver.  I know,”—­with a whimsical smile,—­“because you had no chance to wear them out.  Then we’ll go somewhere, California, Florida, and come back to Roaring Lake in the spring.  You’ll have all the bad taste of this out of your mouth by that time.”

Stella nodded acquiescence.  Better to make the plunge boldly, since she had elected to make it.

“All right.  I’m going to tell Benton,” Fyfe said.  “Good-by till to-morrow.”

She stood up.  He looked at her a long time earnestly, searchingly, one of her hands imprisoned tight between his two big palms.  Then, before she was quite aware of his intention, he kissed her gently on the mouth, and was gone.

* * * * *

This turn of events left Benton dumbfounded, to use a trite but expressive phrase.  He came in, apparently to look at Stella in amazed curiosity, for at first he had nothing to say.  He sat down beside his makeshift desk and pawed over some papers, running the fingers of one hand through his thick brown hair.

“Well, Sis,” he blurted out at last.  “I suppose you know what you’re doing?”

“I think so,” Stella returned composedly.

“But why all this mad haste?” he asked.  “If you’re going to get married, why didn’t you let me know, so I could give you some sort of decent send-off.”

“Oh, thanks,” she returned dryly.  “I don’t think that’s necessary.  Not at this stage of the game, as you occasionally remark.”