No man, she told herself, could make her forget her duty.  If it should befall that her heart, lacking safe anchorage, went astray, that would be her personal cross—­not Jack Fyfe’s. He should never know.  One might feel deeply without being moved to act upon one’s feelings.  So she assured herself.

She never dreamed that Jack Fyfe could possibly have foreseen in Walter Monohan a dangerous factor in their lives.  A man is not supposed to have uncanny intuitions, even when his wife is a wonderfully attractive woman who does not care for him except in a friendly sort of way.  Stella herself had ample warning.  From the first time of meeting, the man’s presence affected her strangely, made an appeal to her that no man had ever made.  She felt it sitting beside him in the plunging launch that day when Roaring Lake reached its watery arms for her.  There was seldom a time when they were together that she did not feel it.  And she pitted her will against it, as something to be conquered and crushed.

There was no denying the man’s personal charm in the ordinary sense of the word.  He was virile, handsome, cultured, just such a man as she could easily have centered her heart upon in times past,—­just such a man as can set a woman’s heart thrilling when he lays siege to her.  If he had made an open bid for Stella’s affection, she, entrenched behind all the accepted canons of her upbringing, would have recoiled from him, viewed him with wholly distrustful eyes.

But he did nothing of the sort.  He was a friend, or at least he became so.  Inevitably they were thrown much together.  There was a continual informal running back and forth between Fyfe’s place and Abbey’s.  Monohan was a lily of the field, although it was common knowledge on Roaring Lake that he was a heavy stock-holder in the Abbey-Monohan combination.  At any rate, he was holidaying on the lake that summer.  There had grown up a genuine intimacy between Linda and Stella.  There were always people at the Abbeys’; sometimes a few guests at the Fyfe bungalow.  Stella’s marvellous voice served to heighten her popularity.  The net result of it all was that in the following three months source three days went by that she did not converse with Monohan.

She could not help making comparisons between the two men.  They stood out in marked contrast, in manner, physique, in everything.  Where Fyfe was reserved almost to taciturnity, impassive-featured, save for that whimsical gleam that was never wholly absent from his keen blue eyes, Monohan talked with facile ease, with wonderful expressiveness of face.  He was a finished product of courteous generations.  Moreover, he had been everywhere, done a little of everything, acquired in his manner something of the versatility of his experience.  Physically he was fit as any logger in the camps, a big, active-bodied, clear-eyed, ruddy man.

What it was about him that stirred her so, Stella could never determine.  She knew beyond peradventure that he had that power.  He had the gift of quick, sympathetic perception,—­but so too had Jack Fyfe, she reminded herself.  Yet no tone of Jack Fyfe’s voice could raise a flutter in her breast, make a faint flush glow in her cheeks, while Monohan could do that.  He did not need to be actively attentive.  It was only necessary for him to be near.