Charlie Benton came to visit them. Strangely enough to Stella, who had
never seen him on Roaring Lake, at least, dressed otherwise than as his
loggers, he was sporting a natty gray suit, he was clean shaven, Oxford
ties on his feet, a gentleman of leisure in his garb. If he had started
on the down grade the previous winter, he bore no signs of it now, for
he was the picture of ruddy vigor, clear-eyed, brown-skinned, alert,
bubbling over with good spirits.

"Why, say, you look like a tourist," Fyfe remarked after an appraising
glance.

"I'm making money, pulling ahead of the game, that's all," Benton
retorted cheerfully. "I can afford to take a holiday now and then. I'm
putting a million feet a month in the water. That's going some for small
fry like me. Say, this house of yours is all to the good, Jack. It's got
class, outside and in. Makes a man feel as if he had to live up to it,
eh? Mackinaws and calked boots don't go with oriental rugs and oak
floors."

"You should get a place like this as soon as possible then," Stella put
in drily, "to keep you up to the mark, on edge aesthetically, one might
put it."

"Not to say morally," Benton laughed. "Oh, maybe I'll get to it by and
by, if the timber business holds up."

Later, when he and Stella were alone together, he said to her:

"You're lucky. You've got everything, and it comes without an effort.
You sure showed good judgment when you picked Jack Fyfe. He's a
thoroughbred."

"Oh, thank you," she returned, a touch of irony in her voice, a subtlety
of inflection that went clean over Charlie's head.

He was full of inquiries about where they had been that winter, what
they had done and seen. Also he brimmed over with his own affairs. He
stayed overnight and went his way with a brotherly threat of making
the Fyfe bungalow his headquarters whenever he felt like it.

"It's a touch of civilization that looks good to me," he declared. "You
can put my private mark on one of those big leather chairs, Jack. I'm
going to use it often. All you need to make this a social center is a
good-looking girl or two--unmarried ones. You watch. When the summer
flock comes to the lake, your place is going to be popular."

That observation verified Benton's shrewdness. The Fyfe bungalow did
become popular. Two weeks after Charlie's visit, a lean, white cruiser,
all brass and mahogany above her topsides, slid up to the float, and two
women came at a dignified pace along the path to