object to be attained. That's all that counts
until they're in a secure position. Then, when they stop to draw their
breath, sometimes they find they've done lots of things they wouldn't do
again. You watch. By and by Charlie Benton will cease to have those
violent reactions that offend you so. As it is--he's a youngster,
bucking a big game. Life, when you have your own way to hew through it,
with little besides your hands and brain for capital, is no silk-lined
affair."

She fell into thought over this reply. Fyfe had echoed almost her
brother's last words to her. And she wondered if Jack Fyfe had attained
that degree of economic power which enabled him to spend several
thousand dollars on a winter's pleasuring with her by the exercise of a
strong man's prerogative of overriding the weak, bending them to his own
inflexible purposes, ruthlessly turning everything to his own advantage?
If women came under the same head! She recalled Katy John, and her face
burned. Perhaps. But she could not put Jack Fyfe in her brother's
category. He didn't fit. Deep in her heart there still lurked an abiding
resentment against Charlie Benton for the restraint he had put upon her
and the license he had arrogated to himself. She could not convince
herself that the lapses of that winter were not part and parcel of her
brother's philosophy of life, a coarse and material philosophy.

Presently they were drawing in to Cougar Point, with the
weather-bleached buildings of Fyfe's camp showing now among the
upspringing second-growth scrub. Fyfe went forward and spoke to the man
at the wheel. The _Panther_ swung offshore.

"Why are we going out again?" Stella asked.

"Oh, just for fun," Fyfe smiled.

He sat down beside her and slipped one arm around her waist. In a few
minutes they cleared the point. Stella was looking away across the lake,
at the deep cleft where Silver Creek split a mountain range in twain.

"Look around," said he, "and tell me what you think of the House of
Fyfe."

There it stood, snow-white, broad-porched, a new house reared upon the
old stone foundation she remembered. The noon sun struck flashing on the
windows. About it spread the living green of the grassy square, behind
that towered the massive, darker-hued background of the forest.

"Oh," she exclaimed. "What wizard of construction did the work. _That_
was why you fussed so long over those plans in Los Angeles. I thought it
was to be this summer or maybe next w