bank of the river, a single
block,--Fyfe's cedar limit,--the camp he thought he would close down.

Why? Immediately the query shaped in her mind. Monohan was concentrating
his men and machinery at the lake head. Fyfe proposed to shut down a
camp but well-established; established because cedar was climbing in
price, an empty market clamoring for cedar logs. Why?

Was there aught of significance in that new camp of Monohan's so near
by; that sudden activity on ground that bisected her husband's property?
A freak limit of timber so poor that Lefty Howe said it could only be
logged at a loss.

She sighed and went out to give dinner orders to Sam Foo. If she could
only go to her husband and talk as they had been able to talk things
over at first. But there had grown up between them a deadly restraint.
She supposed that was inevitable. Both chafed under conditions they
could not change or would not for stubbornness and pride.

It made a deep impression on her, all these successive, disassociated
finger posts, pointing one and all to things under the surface, to
motives and potentialities she had not glimpsed before and could only
guess at now.

Fyfe and Benton came to dinner more or less preoccupied, an odd mood for
Charlie Benton. Afterwards they went into session behind the closed door
of Fyfe's den. An hour or so later Benton went home. While she listened
to the soft _chuff-a-chuff-a-chuff_ of the _Chickamin_ dying away in the
distance, Fyfe came in and slumped down in a chair before the fire where
a big fir stick crackled. He sat there silent, a half-smoked cigar
clamped in one corner of his mouth, the lines of his square jaw in
profile, determined, rigid. Stella eyed him covertly. There were times,
in those moods of concentration, when sheer brute power seemed his most
salient characteristic. Each bulging curve of his thick upper arm, his
neck rising like a pillar from massive shoulders, indicated his power.
Yet so well-proportioned was he that the size and strength of him was
masked by the symmetry of his body, just as the deliberate immobility of
his face screened the play of his feelings. Often Stella found herself
staring at him, fruitlessly wondering what manner of thought and feeling
that repression overlaid. Sometimes a tricksy, half-provoked desire to
break through the barricade of his stoicism tempted her. She told
herself that she ought to be thankful for his aloofness, his
acquiescence in things as they s