it back in her bosom. She caught and pressed his hand there,
against the soft flesh.

"Won't you use it, Jack?" she pleaded. "Won't it help? Don't let any
silly pride influence you. There mustn't ever be anything like that
between us again."

"There won't be," he smiled. "Frankly, if I need it, I'll use it. But
that's a matter there's plenty of time to decide. You see, although
technically I may be broke, I'm a long way from the end of my tether. I
think I'll have my working outfit clear, and the country's full of
timber. I've got a standing in the business that neither fire nor
anything else can destroy. No, I haven't any false pride about the
money, dear. But the money part of our future is a detail. With the
incentive I've got now to work and plan, it won't take me five years to
be a bigger toad in the timber puddle than I ever was. You don't know
what a dynamo I am when I get going."

"I don't doubt that," she said proudly. "But the money's yours, if you
need it."

"I need something else a good deal more right now," he laughed. "That's
something to eat. Aren't you hungry, Stella? Wouldn't you like a cup of
coffee?"

"I'm famished," she admitted--the literal truth. The vaulting uplift of
spirit, that glad little song that kept lilting in her heart, filled her
with peace and contentment, but physically she was beginning to
experience acute hunger. She recalled that she had eaten scarcely
anything that day.

"We'll go down to the camp," Fyfe suggested. "The cook will have
something left. We're camping like pioneers down there. The shacks were
all burned, and somebody sank the cookhouse scow."

They went down the path to the bay, hand in hand, feeling their way
through that fire-blackened area, under a black sky.

A red eye glowed ahead of them, a fire on the beach around which men
squatted on their haunches or lay stretched on their blankets,
sooty-faced fire fighters, a weary group. The air was rank with smoke
wafted from the burning woods.

The cook's fire was dead, and that worthy was humped on his bed-roll
smoking a pipe. But he had cold meat and bread, and he brewed a pot of
coffee on the big fire for them, and Stella ate the plain fare, sitting
in the circle of tired loggers.

"Poor fellows, they look worn out," she said, when they were again
traversing that black road to the bungalow.

"We've slept standing up for three weeks," Fyfe said simply. "They've
done everything they could. And we're not