et him think you are?"

Stella's hands tightened on the crib rail. For an instant her heart
stood still. A wholly unreasoning blaze of anger seized her. But she
controlled that. Pride forbade her betraying herself.

"What a perfectly ridiculous question," she managed to reply.

He looked at her keenly.

"Because, if you have--well, you might be perfectly innocent in the
matter and still get in bad," he continued evenly. "I'd like to put a
bug in your ear."

She bent over Jack Junior, striving to inject an amused note into her
reply.

"Don't be so absurd, Charlie."

"Oh, well, I suppose it is. Only, darn it, I've seen him look at you in
a way--Pouf! I was going to tell you something. Maybe Jack has--only
he's such a close-mouthed beggar. I'm not very anxious to peddle
things." Benton turned again. "I guess you don't need any coaching from
me, anyhow."

He walked out. Stella stared after him, her eyes blazing, hands clenched
into hard-knuckled little fists. She could have struck him.

And still she wondered over and over again, burning with a consuming
fire to know what that "something" was which he had to tell. All the
slumbering devils of a stifled passion awoke to rend her, to make her
rage against the coil in which she was involved. She despised herself
for the weakness of unwise loving, even while she ached to sweep away
the barriers that stood between her and love. Mingled with that there
whispered an intuition of disaster to come, of destiny shaping to
peculiar ends. In Monohan's establishing himself on Roaring Lake she
sensed something more than an industrial shift. In his continued
presence there she saw incalculable sources of trouble. She stood
leaning over the bed rail, staring wistfully at her boy for a few
minutes. When she faced the mirror in her room, she was startled at the
look in her eyes, the nervous twitch of her lips. There was a physical
ache in her breast.

"You're a fool, a fool," she whispered to her image. "Where's your will,
Stella Fyfe? Borrow a little of your husband's backbone.
Presently--presently it won't matter."

One can club a too assertive ego into insensibility. A man may smile and
smile and be a villain still, as the old saying has it, and so may a
woman smile and smile when her heart is tortured, when every nerve in
her is strained to the snapping point. Stella went back to the living
room and sang for them until it was time to go to bed.

The Aldens went first, then