Her clearest judgment of him was at first hand.  He was a big, virile type of man, generous, considerate, so sure of himself that he could be tolerant of others.  She could easily understand why Roaring Lake considered Jack Fyfe “square.”  The other tales of him that circulated there she doubted now.  The fighting type he certainly was, aggressive in a clash, but if there were any downright coarseness in him, it had never manifested itself to her.  She was not sorry she had married him.  If they had not set out blind in a fog of sentiment, as he had once put it, nevertheless they got on.  She did not love him,—­not as she defined that magic word,—­but she liked him, was mildly proud of him.  When he kissed her, if there were no mad thrill in it, there was at least a passive contentment in having inspired that affection.  For he left her in no doubt as to where he stood, not by what he said, but wholly by his actions.

He joined her now.  The Panther, glossy black as a crow’s wing with fresh paint, lay at the pier-end with their trunks aboard.  Stella surveyed those marked with her initials, looking them over with a critical eye, when they reached the deck.

“How in the world did I ever manage to accumulate so much stuff, Jack?” she asked quizzically.  “I didn’t realize it.  We might have been doing Europe with souvenir collecting our principal aim, by the amount of our baggage.”

Fyfe smiled, without commenting.  They sat on a trunk and watched Roaring Springs fall astern, dwindle to a line of white dots against the great green base of the mountain that rose behind it.

“It’s good to get back here,” he said at last.  “To me, anyway.  How about it, Stella?  You haven’t got so much of a grievance with the world in general as you had when we left, eh?”

“No, thank goodness,” she responded fervently.

“You don’t look as if you had,” he observed, his eyes admiringly upon her.

Nor had she.  There was a bloom on the soft contour of her cheek, a luminous gleam in her wide, gray eyes.  All the ill wrought by months of drudging work and mental revolt had vanished.  She was undeniably good to look at, a woman in full flower, round-bodied, deep-breasted, aglow with the unquenched fires of youth.  She was aware that Jack Fyfe found her so and tolerably glad that he did so find her.  She had revised a good many of her first groping estimates of him that winter.  And when she looked over the port bow and saw in behind Halfway Point the huddled shacks of her brother’s camp where so much had overtaken her, she experienced a swift rush of thankfulness that she was—­as she was.  She slid her gloved hand impulsively into Jack Fyfe’s, and his strong fingers shut down on hers closely.

They sat silent until the camp lay abeam.  About it there was every sign of activity.  A chunky stern-wheeler, with blow-off valve hissing, stood by a boom of logs in the bay, and men were moving back and forth across the swifters, making all ready for a tow.  Stella marked a new bunkhouse.  Away back on the logging ground in a greater clearing she saw the separate smoke of two donkey engines.  Another, a big roader, Fyfe explained, puffed at the water’s edge.  She could see a string of logs tearing down the skid-road.