“Not to say morally,” Benton laughed.  “Oh, maybe I’ll get to it by and by, if the timber business holds up.”

Later, when he and Stella were alone together, he said to her: 

“You’re lucky.  You’ve got everything, and it comes without an effort.  You sure showed good judgment when you picked Jack Fyfe.  He’s a thoroughbred.”

“Oh, thank you,” she returned, a touch of irony in her voice, a subtlety of inflection that went clean over Charlie’s head.

He was full of inquiries about where they had been that winter, what they had done and seen.  Also he brimmed over with his own affairs.  He stayed overnight and went his way with a brotherly threat of making the Fyfe bungalow his headquarters whenever he felt like it.

“It’s a touch of civilization that looks good to me,” he declared.  “You can put my private mark on one of those big leather chairs, Jack.  I’m going to use it often.  All you need to make this a social center is a good-looking girl or two—­unmarried ones.  You watch.  When the summer flock comes to the lake, your place is going to be popular.”

That observation verified Benton’s shrewdness.  The Fyfe bungalow did become popular.  Two weeks after Charlie’s visit, a lean, white cruiser, all brass and mahogany above her topsides, slid up to the float, and two women came at a dignified pace along the path to the house.  Stella had met Linda Abbey once, reluctantly, under the circumstances, but it was different now—­with the difference that money makes.  She could play hostess against an effective background, and she did so graciously.  Nor was her graciousness wholly assumed.  After all, they were her kind of people:  Linda, fair-haired, perfectly gowned, perfectly mannered, sweetly pretty; Mrs. Abbey, forty-odd and looking thirty-five, with that calm self-assurance which wealth and position confer upon those who hold it securely.  Stella found them altogether to her liking.  It pleased her, too, that Jack happened in to meet them.  He was not a scintillating talker, yet she had noticed that when he had anything to say, he never failed to attract and hold attention.  His quiet, impersonal manner never suggested stolidness.  And she was too keen an observer to overlook the fact that from a purely physical standpoint Jack Fyfe made an impression always, particularly on women.  Throughout that winter it had not disturbed her.  It did not disturb her now, when she noticed Linda Abbey’s gaze coming back to him with a veiled appraisal in her blue eyes that were so like Fyfe’s own in their tendency to twinkle and gleam with no corresponding play of features.

“We’ll expect to see a good deal of you this summer,” Mrs. Abbey said cordially at leave-taking.  “We have a few people up from town now and then to vary the monotony of feasting our souls on scenery.  Sometimes we are quite a jolly crowd.  Don’t be formal.  Drop in when you feel the inclination.”

When Stella reminded Jack of this some time later, in a moment of boredom, he put the Panther at her disposal for the afternoon.  But he would not go himself.  He had opened up a new outlying camp, and he had directions to issue, work to lay out.