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Five minutes effected a complete arrangement, and the Panther drew off with the drunken cook singing atop of the pilot house, and Renfrew comfortable in her cabin, and Jack Fyfe's promise to see him properly installed and attended in the local hospital at Roaring Springs. Benton heaved a sigh of relief and turned to his sister.
With the recurrence of spring, Fyfe's household transferred itself to the Roaring Lake bungalow again. Stella found the change welcome, for Vancouver wearied her. It was a little too crude, too much as yet in the transitory stage, in that civic hobbledehoy period which overtakes every village that shoots up over-swiftly to a city's dimensions.
She perceived that this manner of fishing was highly successful, insomuch as at every fourth or fifth cast a trout struck his fly, breaking water with a vigorous splash. Then the bamboo would arch as the fish struggled, making sundry leaps clear of the water, gleaming like silver each time he broke the surface, but coming at last tamely to Jack Fyfe's landing net.
A maid interrupted these self-communings to say that some one had called her over the telephone, and Stella went down to the library. She wasn't prepared for the voice that came over the line, but she recognized it instantly as Fyfe's. "Listen, Stella," he said. "I'm sorry this has happened, but I can't very well avoid it now, without causing comment. I had no choice about coming to Vancouver.
"I don't care to get into any argument with him, especially as he's going to be my brother-in-law. Fyfe's all right. I didn't imagine he was the sort of man you'd fancy, that's all." Stella refrained from any comment on this.
"Literally or slangily?" she asked in a flippant tone. Fyfe's reputation, rather vividly colored, had reached her from various sources. She was not quite sure whether she cared to countenance him or not. There was a disturbing quality in his glance, a subtle suggestion of force about him that she felt without being able to define in understandable terms.
He had the gift of quick, sympathetic perception, but so too had Jack Fyfe, she reminded herself. Yet no tone of Jack Fyfe's voice could raise a flutter in her breast, make a faint flush glow in her cheeks, while Monohan could do that. He did not need to be actively attentive. It was only necessary for him to be near.
She could not convince herself that the lapses of that winter were not part and parcel of her brother's philosophy of life, a coarse and material philosophy. Presently they were drawing in to Cougar Point, with the weather-bleached buildings of Fyfe's camp showing now among the upspringing second-growth scrub. Fyfe went forward and spoke to the man at the wheel. The Panther swung offshore.
And when she tried to head up into it again, one comber bigger than its fellows reared up and slapped a barrel of water inboard. The next wave swamped her. Sunk to the clamps, Stella held fast to the topsides, crouching on her knees, immersed to the hips in water that struck a chill through her flesh. She had the wit to remember and act upon Jack Fyfe's coaching, namely, to sit tight and hang on.
"Ah, well," she sighed, when she came back to her rooms and put Fyfe's letter away in a drawer. "I'll do the decent thing if they ask me. I wonder what Jack would say if he knew what I've been debating with myself this afternoon?
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