looding in hot, successive waves to the roots of
her thick, brown hair.

"If I thought--I could," she whispered into her pillow, "I'd try. But I
daren't. I'm afraid. It's just a mood, I know it is. I've had it before.
A--ah! I'm a spineless jellyfish, a weathercock that whirls to every
emotional breeze. And I won't be. I'll stand on my own feet if I can--so
help me God, I will!"

CHAPTER XXII

THE FIRE BEHIND THE SMOKE

This is no intimate chronicle of Charlie Benton and Linda Abbey, save in
so far as they naturally furnish a logical sequence in what transpired.
Therefore the details of their nuptials is of no particular concern.
They were wedded, ceremonially dined as befitted the occasion, and
departed upon their hypothetical honeymoon, surreptitiously abbreviated
from an extravagant swing over half of North America to seventy miles by
rail and twenty by water,--and a month of blissful seclusion, which
suited those two far better than any amount of Pullman touring, besides
leaving them money in pocket.

When they were gone, Stella caught the next boat for Seattle. She had
drawn fresh breath in the meantime, and while she felt tenderly, almost
maternally, sorry for Jack Fyfe, she swung back to the old attitude.
Even granting, she argued, that she could muster courage to take up the
mantle of wifehood where she laid it off, there was no surety that they
could do more than compromise. There was the stubborn fact that she had
openly declared her love for another man, that by her act she had
plunged her husband into far-reaching conflict. Such a conflict existed.
She could put her finger on no concrete facts, but it was in the air.
She heard whispers of a battle between giants--a financial duel to the
death--with all the odds against Jack Fyfe.

Win or lose, there would be scars. And the struggle, if not of and by
her deed, had at least sprung into malevolent activity through her. Men,
she told herself, do not forget these things; they rankle. Jack Fyfe was
only human. No, Stella felt that they could only come safe to the old
port by virtue of a passion that could match Fyfe's own. And she put
that rather sadly beyond her, beyond the possibilities. She had felt
stirrings of it, but not to endure. She was proud and sensitive and
growing wise with bitterly accumulated experience. It had to be all or
nothing with them, a cleaving together complete enough to erase and
forever obliterate all that had gone before.