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"I'll go see what he wants," Fyfe remarked, "Calked boots won't be good for the porch floor." She followed him. "Stay in. It's cold." He stopped in the doorway. "No. I'm coming," she persisted. They met the lantern bearer at the foot of the steps. "Well, Thorsen?" Fyfe shot at him. There was an unusual note of sharpness in his voice, an irritated expectation.
Part of this conclusion came from hearsay, part from observation, limited though her opportunities had been for the latter. Miss Stella Benton, for all her poise, was not above jumping at conclusions. There was something about Jack Fyfe that she resented.
It wasn't a question of comparison; the two men stood apart, distinctive, in every attribute. The qualities in Fyfe that she understood and appreciated, she beheld glorified in Monohan. Yet it was not, after all, a question of qualities. It was something more subtle, something of the heart which defied logical analysis. Fyfe had never been able to set her pulse dancing.
While the chain was still chattering in the hawse pipe, the squat black hull of Jack Fyfe's tender rounded the nearest point. "Whistle him up, Sam," Benton ordered. "Jack can beat our time, and this bleeding must be stopped quick." The tender veered in from her course at the signal. Fyfe himself was at the wheel.
Fyfe Lathewood, one of the shrewdest detectives in New York City, told him all the circumstances, and ordered him to find out the whole truth, no matter what it cost, or where it might strike. The detective had been at work the better part of a week, without any one in Bellemore suspecting his identity or business.
And still her heart cried out for Monohan. She flared hot against the disparaging note, the unconcealed contempt Fyfe seemed to have for him. Yet in spite of her eager defence of him, there was something ugly about that clash with Fyfe in the edge of the woods, something that jarred. It wasn't spontaneous. She could not understand that tigerish onslaught of Monohan's.
The head designer had looked on in disapproval while her employer's wife had experimented with scraps of cloth, and pins, and chalk, and scissors. But Emma had gone on serenely cutting and snipping and pinning. They made up samples of service shirts with the new neck-hugging collar and submitted them to Miss Nevins, the head of the woman's uniform department at Fyfe & Gordon's.
It happened that when he drew in to his cookhouse float, Stella was standing in her kitchen door. Fyfe looked up at her and held aloft a dozen trout strung by the gills on a stick, gleaming in the sun. "Vanity," she commented inaudibly. "I wonder if he thinks I've been admiring his skill as a fisherman?"
His quiet, impersonal manner never suggested stolidness. And she was too keen an observer to overlook the fact that from a purely physical standpoint Jack Fyfe made an impression always, particularly on women. Throughout that winter it had not disturbed her.
But she shook her head resolutely, and as Katy John came in just then, Fyfe took his foot off the stove and went out of the kitchen. He threw a glance over his shoulder at Stella, a broad smile, as if to say that he harbored no grudge, and nursed no wound in his vanity because she would have none of him. Katy rang the breakfast gong.
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