's been a bugaboo ever
since I came to the lake."

"Yes, but never like it is this summer," Benton frowned. "Oh, well, no
use borrowing trouble, I suppose."

Stella rose.

"When Jack comes, I'll be in the library," she said. "I'm going to read
a while."

But the book she took up lay idle in her lap. She looked forward to that
meeting with a curious mixture of reluctance and regret. She could not
face it unmoved. No woman who has ever lain passive in a man's arms can
ever again look into that man's eyes with genuine indifference. She may
hate him or love him with a degree of intensity according to her nature,
be merely friendly, or nurse a slow resentment. But there is always that
intangible something which differentiates him from other men. Stella
felt now a shyness of him, a little dread of him, less sureness of
herself, as he swung out of the machine and took the house steps with
that effortless lightness on his feet that she remembered so well.

She heard him in the hall, his deep voice mingling with the thin,
penetrating tones of Mrs. Abbey. And then the library door opened, and
he came in. Stella had risen, and stood uncertainly at one corner of a
big reading table, repressing an impulse to fly, finding herself
stricken with a strange recurrence of the feeling she had first disliked
him for arousing in her,--a sense of needing to be on her guard, of
impending assertion of a will infinitely more powerful than her own.

But that was, she told herself, only a state of mind, and Fyfe put her
quickly at her ease. He came up to the table and seated himself on the
edge of it an arm's length from her, swinging one foot free. He looked
at her intently. There was no shadow of expression on his face, only in
his clear eyes lurked a gleam of feeling.

"Well, lady," he said at length, "you're looking fine. How goes
everything?"

"Fairly well," she answered.

"Seems odd, doesn't it, to meet like this?" he ventured. "I'd have
dodged it, if it had been politic. As it is, there's no harm done, I
imagine. Mrs. Abbey assured me we'd be free from interruption. If the
exceedingly cordial dame had an inkling of how things stand between us,
I daresay she'd be holding her breath about now."

"Why do you talk like that, Jack?" Stella protested nervously.

"Well, I have to say something," he remarked, after a moment's
reflection. "I can't sit here and just look at you. That would be rude,
not to say embarrassing."

Stella bi