Nevertheless she had recurring periods when moodiness and ill-stifled discontent got hold of her.  Sometimes she stole out along the cliffs to sit on a mossy boulder, staring with absent eyes at the distant hills.  And sometimes she would slip out in a canoe, to lie rocking in the lake swell,—­just dreaming, filled with a passive sort of regret.  She could not change things now, but she could not help wishing she could.

Fyfe warned her once about getting offshore in the canoe.  Roaring Lake, pent in the shape of a boomerang between two mountain ranges, was subject to squalls.  Sudden bursts of wind would shoot down its length like blasts from some monster funnel.  Stella knew that; she had seen the glassy surface torn into whitecaps in ten minutes, but she was not afraid of the lake nor the lake winds.  She was hard and strong.  The open, the clean mountain air, and a measure of activity, had built her up physically.  She swam like a seal.  Out in that sixteen-foot Peterboro she could detach herself from her world of reality, lie back on a cushion, and lose herself staring at the sky.  She paid little heed to Fyfe’s warning beyond a smiling assurance that she had no intention of courting a watery end.

So one day in mid-July she waved a farewell to Jack Junior, crowing in his nurse’s lap on the bank, paddled out past the first point to the north, and pillowing her head on a cushioned thwart, gave herself up to dreamy contemplation on the sky.  There was scarce a ripple on the lake.  A faint breath of an offshore breeze fanned her, drifting the canoe at a snail’s pace out from land.  Stella luxuriated in the quiet afternoon.  A party of campers cruising the lake had tarried at the bungalow till after midnight.  Jack Fyfe had risen at dawn to depart for some distant logging point.  Stella, once wakened, had risen and breakfasted with him.  She was tired, drowsy, content to lie there in pure physical relaxation.  Lying so, before she was aware of it, her eyes closed.

She wakened with a start at a cold touch of moisture on her face,—­rain, great pattering drops.  Overhead an ominously black cloud hid the face of the sun.  The shore, when she looked, lay a mile and a half abeam.  To the north and between her and the land’s rocky line was a darkening of the lake’s surface.  Stella reached for her paddle.  The black cloud let fall long, gray streamers of rain.  There was scarcely a stirring of the air, but that did not deceive her.  There was a growing chill, and there was that broken line sweeping down the lake.  Behind that was wind, a summer gale, the black squall dreaded by the Siwashes.

She had to buck her way to shore through that.  She drove hard on the paddle.  She was not afraid, but there rose in her a peculiar tensed-up feeling.  Ahead lay a ticklish bit of business.  The sixteen-foot canoe dwarfed to pitiful dimensions in the face of that snarling line of wind-harried water.  She could hear the distant murmur of it presently, and gusty puffs of wind began to strike her.