uld leave her
forever transfixed with remorseful horror. The fact that already the
machinery of the law which would eventually bring Monohan to book for
the double lawlessness of arson and attempted homicide must be in
motion, that the Provincial police would be hard on his trail, did not
occur to her. She could only visualize him progressing step by step from
one lawless deed to another. And in her mind every step led to Jack
Fyfe, who had made a mock of him. She found her hands clenching till the
nails dug deep.

Linda's head drooped over the teacup. Her eyelids blinked.

"Dear," Stella said tenderly, "come and lie down. You're worn out."

"Perhaps I'd better," Linda muttered. "There's another room in there."

Stella tucked the weary girl into the bed, and went back to the kitchen,
and sat down in the willow rocker. After another hour the nurse came out
and prepared her own breakfast. Benton was still sleeping. He was in no
danger, the nurse told Stella. The bullet had driven cleanly through his
body, missing as by a miracle any vital part, and lodged in the muscles
of his back, whence the surgeon had removed it. Though weak from shock,
loss of blood, excitement, he had rallied splendidly, and fallen into a
normal sleep.

Later the doctor confirmed this. He made light of the wound. One
couldn't kill a young man as full of vitality as Charlie Benton with an
axe, he informed Stella with an optimistic smile. Which lifted one
burden from her mind.

The night nurse went away, and another from the hospital took her place.
Benton slept; Linda slept. The house was very quiet. To Stella, brooding
in that kitchen chair, it became oppressive, that funeral hush. When it
was drawing near ten o'clock, she walked up the road past the corner
store and post-office, and so out to the end of the wharf.

The air was hot and heavy, pungent, gray with the smoke. Farther along,
St. Allwoods bulked mistily amid its grounds. The crescent of shore line
half a mile distant was wholly obscured. Up over the eastern mountain
range the sun, high above the murk, hung like a bloody orange, rayless
and round. No hotel guests strolled by pairs and groups along the bank.
She could understand that no one would come for pleasure into that
suffocating atmosphere. Caught in that great bowl of which the lake
formed the watery bottom, the smoke eddied and rolled like a cloud of
mist.

She stood a while gazing at the glassy surface of the lake where i