ade,--unless I've sized you up wrong. It'll simply be a case of our
adjusting ourselves, just as mating couples have been doing since the
year one. You've everything to gain and nothing to lose."

"In some ways," she murmured.

"Every way," he insisted. "You aren't handicapped by caring for any
other man."

"How do you know?" she asked.

"Just a hunch," Fyfe smiled. "If you did, he'd have beaten me to the
rescue long ago--if he were the sort of man you _could_ care for."

"No," she admitted. "There isn't any other man, but there might be.
Think how terrible it would be if it happened--afterward."

Fyfe shrugged his shoulders.

"Sufficient unto the day," he said. "There is no string on either of us
just now. We start even. That's good enough. Will you?"

"You have me at a disadvantage," she whispered. "You offer me a lot that
I want, everything but a feeling I've somehow always believed ought to
exist, ought to be mutual. Part of me wants to shut my eyes and jump.
Part of me wants to hang back. I can't stand this thing I've got into
and see no way of getting out of. Yet I dread starting a new train of
wretchedness. I'm afraid--whichever way I turn."

Fyfe considered this a moment.

"Well," he said finally, "that's a rather unfortunate attitude. But I'm
going into it with my eyes open. I know what I want. You'll be making a
sort of experiment. Still, I advise you to make it. I think you'll be
the better for making it. Come on. Say yes."

Stella looked up at him, then out over the banked snow, and all the
dreary discomforts, the mean drudgery, the sordid shifts she had been
put to for months rose up in disheartening phalanx. For that moment Jack
Fyfe loomed like a tower of refuge. She trusted him now. She had a
feeling that even if she grew to dislike him, she would still trust him.
He would play fair. If he said he would do this or that, she could bank
on it absolutely.

She turned and looked at him searchingly a long half-minute, wondering
what really lay behind the blue eyes that met her own so steadfastly. He
stood waiting patiently, outwardly impassive. But she could feel through
the thin stuff of her dress a quiver in the fingers that rested on her
shoulder, and that repressed sign of the man's pent-up feeling gave her
an odd thrill, moved her strangely, swung the pendulum of her impulse.

"Yes," she said.

Fyfe bent a little lower.

"Listen," he said in characteristically blunt fashion. "You want t