It was a pale, weary-eyed young woman, dressed in the same plain tailored suit she had worn into the country, who was cuddled to Mrs. Howe’s plump bosom when she went aboard the Panther for the first stage of her journey.

A slaty bank of cloud spread a somber film across the sky.  When the Panther laid her ice-sheathed guard-rail against the Hot Springs wharf the sun was down.  The lake spread gray and lifeless under a gray sky, and Stella Benton’s spirits were steeped in that same dour color.

CHAPTER XII

AND SO THEY WERE MARRIED

Spring had waved her transforming wand over the lake region before the Fyfes came home again.  All the low ground, the creeks and hollows and banks, were bright green with new-leaved birch and alder and maple.  The air was full of those aromatic exudations the forest throws off when it is in the full tide of the growing time.  Shores that Stella had last seen dismal and forlorn in the frost-fog, sheathed in ice, banked with deep snow, lay sparkling now in warm sunshine, under an unflecked arch of blue.  All that was left of winter was the white cap on Mount Douglas, snow-filled chasms on distant, rocky peaks.  Stella stood on the Hot Springs wharf looking out across the emerald deep of the lake, thinking soberly of the contrast.

Something, she reflected, some part of that desolate winter, must have seeped to the very roots of her being to produce the state of mind in which she embarked upon that matrimonial voyage.  A little of it clung to her still.  She could look back at those months of loneliness, of immeasurable toil and numberless indignities, without any qualms.  There would be no repetition of that.  The world at large would say she had done well.  She herself in her most cynical moments could not deny that she had done well.  Materially, life promised to be generous.  She was married to a man who quietly but inexorably got what he wanted, and it was her good fortune that he wanted her to have the best of everything.

She saw him now coming from the hotel, and she regarded him thoughtfully, a powerful figure swinging along with light, effortless steps.  He was back on his own ground, openly glad to be back.  Yet she could not recall that he had ever shown himself at a disadvantage anywhere they had been together.  He wore evening clothes when occasion required as unconcernedly as he wore mackinaws and calked boots among his loggers.  She had not yet determined whether his equable poise arose from an unequivocal democracy of spirit, or from sheer egotism.  At any rate, where she had set out with subtle misgivings, she had to admit that socially, at least, Jack Fyfe could play his hand at any turn of the game.  Where or how he came by this faculty, she did not know.  In fact, so far as Jack Fyfe’s breeding and antecedents were concerned, she knew little more than before their marriage.  He was not given to reminiscence.  His people—­distant relatives—­lived in her own native state of Pennsylvania.  He had an only sister who was now in South America with her husband, a civil engineer.  Beyond that Fyfe did not go, and Stella made no attempt to pry up the lid of his past.  She was not particularly curious.