se to him, stroking tenderly the glossy brown hair
that flowed about her shoulders.

"Try it, Stella," he whispered passionately. "Try wanting to like me,
for a change. I can't make love by myself. Shake off that infernal
apathy that's taking possession of you where I'm concerned. If you can't
love me, for God's sake fight with me. Do _something_!"

CHAPTER XVI

THE CRISIS

Looking back at that evening as the summer wore on, Stella perceived
that it was the starting point of many things, no one of them definitely
outstanding by itself but bulking large as a whole. Fyfe made his
appeal, and it left her unmoved save in certain superficial aspects. She
was sorry, but she was mostly sorry for herself. And she denied his
premonition of disaster. If, she said to herself, they got no raptures
out of life, at least they got along without friction. In her mind their
marriage, no matter that it lacked what she no less than Fyfe deemed an
essential to happiness, was a fixed state, final, irrevocable, not to be
altered by any emotional vagaries.

No man, she told herself, could make her forget her duty. If it should
befall that her heart, lacking safe anchorage, went astray, that would
be her personal cross--not Jack Fyfe's. _He_ should never know. One
might feel deeply without being moved to act upon one's feelings. So she
assured herself.

She never dreamed that Jack Fyfe could possibly have foreseen in Walter
Monohan a dangerous factor in their lives. A man is not supposed to have
uncanny intuitions, even when his wife is a wonderfully attractive
woman who does not care for him except in a friendly sort of way.
Stella herself had ample warning. From the first time of meeting, the
man's presence affected her strangely, made an appeal to her that no man
had ever made. She felt it sitting beside him in the plunging launch
that day when Roaring Lake reached its watery arms for her. There was
seldom a time when they were together that she did not feel it. And she
pitted her will against it, as something to be conquered and crushed.

There was no denying the man's personal charm in the ordinary sense of
the word. He was virile, handsome, cultured, just such a man as she
could easily have centered her heart upon in times past,--just such a
man as can set a woman's heart thrilling when he lays siege to her. If
he had made an open bid for Stella's affection, she, entrenched behind
all the accepted canons of her upbringing