bosom when she went aboard the _Panther_ for the first
stage of her journey.

A slaty bank of cloud spread a somber film across the sky. When the
_Panther_ laid her ice-sheathed guard-rail against the Hot Springs wharf
the sun was down. The lake spread gray and lifeless under a gray sky,
and Stella Benton's spirits were steeped in that same dour color.

CHAPTER XII

AND SO THEY WERE MARRIED

Spring had waved her transforming wand over the lake region before the
Fyfes came home again. All the low ground, the creeks and hollows and
banks, were bright green with new-leaved birch and alder and maple. The
air was full of those aromatic exudations the forest throws off when it
is in the full tide of the growing time. Shores that Stella had last
seen dismal and forlorn in the frost-fog, sheathed in ice, banked with
deep snow, lay sparkling now in warm sunshine, under an unflecked arch
of blue. All that was left of winter was the white cap on Mount Douglas,
snow-filled chasms on distant, rocky peaks. Stella stood on the Hot
Springs wharf looking out across the emerald deep of the lake, thinking
soberly of the contrast.

Something, she reflected, some part of that desolate winter, must have
seeped to the very roots of her being to produce the state of mind in
which she embarked upon that matrimonial voyage. A little of it clung to
her still. She could look back at those months of loneliness, of
immeasurable toil and numberless indignities, without any qualms. There
would be no repetition of that. The world at large would say she had
done well. She herself in her most cynical moments could not deny that
she had done well. Materially, life promised to be generous. She was
married to a man who quietly but inexorably got what he wanted, and it
was her good fortune that he wanted her to have the best of everything.

She saw him now coming from the hotel, and she regarded him
thoughtfully, a powerful figure swinging along with light, effortless
steps. He was back on his own ground, openly glad to be back. Yet she
could not recall that he had ever shown himself at a disadvantage
anywhere they had been together. He wore evening clothes when occasion
required as unconcernedly as he wore mackinaws and calked boots among
his loggers. She had not yet determined whether his equable poise arose
from an unequivocal democracy of spirit, or from sheer egotism. At any
rate, where she had set out with subtle misgivings, she had to ad