ith an eye consistently
blind to the concealed lapses of its men.

Stella Benton passed that morning through successive stages of shocked
amazement, of pity, and disgust. As between her brother and the Siwash
girl, she saw little to choose. From her virtuous pinnacle she abhorred
both. If she had to continue intimate living with them, she felt that
she would be utterly defiled, degraded to their level. That was her
first definite conclusion.

After a time she heard Benton come into their living room and light a
fire in the heater. She dried her eyes and went out to face him.

"Charlie," she declared desperately, "I can't stay here any longer. It's
simply impossible."

"Don't start that song again. We've had it often enough," he answered
stubbornly. "You're not going--not till spring. I'm not going to let you
go in the frame of mind you're in right now, anyhow. You'll get over
that. Hang it, I'm not the first man whose foot slipped. It isn't your
funeral, anyway. Forget it."

The grumbling coarseness of this retort left her speechless. Benton got
the fire going and went out. She saw him cross to the kitchen, and later
she saw Katy John leave the camp with all her belongings in a bundle
over her shoulder, trudging away to the camp of her people around the
point.

Kipling's pregnant line shot across her mind:

"For the colonel's lady and Judy O'Grady are sisters under their skins."

"I wonder," she mused. "I wonder if we are? I wonder if that poor,
little, brown-skinned fool isn't after all as much a victim as I am. She
doesn't know better, maybe; but Charlie does, and he doesn't seem to
care. It merely embarrasses him to be found out, that's all. It isn't
right. It isn't fair, or decent, or anything. We're just for him to--to
use."

She looked out along the shores piled high with broken ice and snow,
through a misty air to distant mountains that lifted themselves
imperiously aloof, white spires against the sky,--over a forest all
draped in winter robes; shore, mountains, and forest alike were chill
and hushed and desolate. The lake spread its forty-odd miles in a
boomerang curve from Roaring Springs to Fort Douglas, a cold, lifeless
gray. She sat a long time looking at that, and a dead weight seemed to
settle upon her heart. For the second time that day she broke down. Not
the shamed, indignant weeping of an hour earlier, but with the essence
of all things forlorn and desolate in her choked sobs.

She did not