lake, aching and longing for your man up there in the
smoke as I ache and long for mine. Misery loves company."

Stella's eyes were clouded as the train pulled out. Something in Linda
Benton's parting words made her acutely lonely, dispirited, out of joint
with the world she was deliberately fashioning for herself. Into Linda's
life something big and elemental had come. The butterfly of yesterday
had become the strong man's mate of to-day. Linda's heart was
unequivocally up there in the smoke and flame with her man, fighting for
their mutual possessions, hoping with him, fearing for him, longing for
him, secure in the knowledge that if nothing else was left them, they
had each other. It was a rare and beautiful thing to feel like that. And
beyond that sorrowful vision of what she lacked to achieve any real and
enduring happiness, there loomed also a self-torturing conviction that
she herself had set in motion those forces which now threatened ruin for
her brother and Jack Fyfe.

There was no logical proof of this. Only intuitive, subtle suggestions
gleaned here and there, shadowy finger-posts which pointed to Monohan
as a deadly hater and with a score chalked up against Fyfe to which she
had unconsciously added. He had desired her, and twice Fyfe had treated
him like an urchin caught in mischief. She recalled how Monohan sprang
at him like a tiger that day on the lake shore. She realized how bitter
a humiliation it must have been to suffer that sardonic cuffing at
Fyfe's hands. Monohan wasn't the type of man who would ever forget or
forgive either that or the terrible grip on his throat.

Even at the time she had sensed this and dreaded what it might
ultimately lead to. Even while her being answered eagerly to the
physical charm of him, she had fought against admitting to herself what
desperate intent might have lain back of the killing of Billy Dale,--a
shot that Lefty Howe declared was meant for Fyfe. She had long outgrown
Monohan's lure, but if he had come to her or written to make out a case
for himself when she first went to Seattle, she would have accepted his
word against anything. Her heart would have fought for him against the
logic of her brain.

But--she had had a long time to think, to compare, to digest all that
she knew of him, much that was subconscious impression rising late to
the surface, a little that she heard from various sources. The sum total
gave her a man of rank passions, of rare and mercil