l-knit shoulders, ropy-muscled
arms. He could easily have posed for a Viking, so strikingly blond was
he, with fair, curly hair. She judged that he might be around thirty,
yet his face was altogether boyish.

Sitting there beside him, shivering in her wet clothes, she found
herself wondering what magnetic quality there could be about a man that
focussed a woman's attention upon him whether she willed it or no. Why
should she feel an oddly-disturbing thrill at the mere physical nearness
of this fair-haired stranger? She did. There was no debating that. And
she wondered--wondered if a bolt of that lightning she had dreaded ever
since her marriage was about to strike her now. She hoped not. All her
emotions had lain fallow. If Jack Fyfe had no power to stir her,--and
she told herself Jack had so failed, without asking herself why,--then
some other man might easily accomplish that, to her unutterable grief.
She had told herself many a time that no more terrible plight could
overtake her than to love and be loved and sit with hands folded,
foregoing it all. She shrank from so tragic an evolution. It meant only
pain, the ache of unfulfilled, unattainable desires. If, she reflected
cynically, this man beside her stood for such a motif in her life, he
might better have left her out in the swamped canoe.

While she sat there, drawn-faced with the cold, thinking rather amazedly
these things which she told herself she had no right to think, the
launch slipped into the quiet nook of Cougar Bay and slowed down to the
float.

Monohan helped her out, threw off the canoe's painter, and climbed back
into the launch.

"You're as wet as I am," Stella said. "Won't you come up to the house
and get a change of clothes? I haven't even thanked you."

"Nothing to be thanked for," he smiled up at her. "Only please remember
not to get offshore in a canoe again. I mightn't be handy the next
time--and Roaring Lake's as fickle as your charming sex. All smiles one
minute, storming the next. No, I won't stay this time, thanks. A little
wet won't hurt me. I wasn't in the water long enough to get chilled, you
know. I'll be home in half an hour. Run along and get dressed, Mrs.
Fyfe, and drink something hot to drive that chill away. Good-by."

Stella went up to the house, her hand tingling with his parting grip.
Over and above the peril she had escaped rose an uneasy vision of a
greater peril to her peace of mind. The platitudes of soul-affinity, of