“Well, Miss Ship-wrecked Mariner,” said he lightly, “where do you wish to be landed?”

“Over there, if you please.”  Stella pointed to where the red roof of the bungalow stood out against the green.  “I’m Mrs. Fyfe.”

“Ah!” said he.  An expression of veiled surprise flashed across his face.  “Another potential romance strangled at birth.  You know, I hoped you were some local maiden before whom I could pose as a heroic rescuer.  Such is life.  Odd, too.  Linda Abbey—­I’m the Monohan tail to the Abbey business kite, you see—­impressed me as pilot for a spin this afternoon and backed out at the last moment.  I think she smelled this blow.  So I went out for a ride by myself.  I was glowering at that new house through a glass when I spied you out in the thick of it.”

He had the clutch in now, and the launch was cleaving the seas, even at half speed throwing out wide wings of spray.  Some of this the wind brought across the cockpit.  “Come up into this seat,” Monohan commanded.  “I don’t suppose you can get any wetter, but if you put your feet through this bulkhead door, the heat from the engine will warm you.  By Jove, you’re fairly shivering.”

“It’s lucky for me you happened along,” Stella remarked, when she was ensconced behind the bulkhead.  “I was getting so cold.  I don’t know how much longer I could have stood it.”

“Thank the good glasses that picked you out.  You were only a speck on the water, you know, when I sighted you first.”

He kept silent after that.  All his faculties were centered on the seas ahead which rolled up before the sharp cutwater of the launch.  He was making time and still trying to avoid boarding seas.  When a big one lifted ahead, he slowed down.  He kept one hand on the throttle control, whistling under his breath disconnected snatches of song.  Stella studied his profile, clean-cut as a cameo and wholly pleasing.  He was almost as big-bodied as Jack Fyfe, and full four inches taller.  The wet shirt clinging close to his body outlined well-knit shoulders, ropy-muscled arms.  He could easily have posed for a Viking, so strikingly blond was he, with fair, curly hair.  She judged that he might be around thirty, yet his face was altogether boyish.

Sitting there beside him, shivering in her wet clothes, she found herself wondering what magnetic quality there could be about a man that focussed a woman’s attention upon him whether she willed it or no.  Why should she feel an oddly-disturbing thrill at the mere physical nearness of this fair-haired stranger?  She did.  There was no debating that.  And she wondered—­wondered if a bolt of that lightning she had dreaded ever since her marriage was about to strike her now.  She hoped not.  All her emotions had lain fallow.  If Jack Fyfe had no power to stir her,—­and she told herself Jack had so failed, without asking herself why,—­then some other man might easily accomplish that, to her unutterable grief.  She had told herself many a time that no more terrible plight could overtake her than to love and be loved and sit with hands folded, foregoing it all.  She shrank from so tragic an evolution.  It meant only pain, the ache of unfulfilled, unattainable desires.  If, she reflected cynically, this man beside her stood for such a motif in her life, he might better have left her out in the swamped canoe.