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So she was whirled along a country road, jolted in the tonneau between a fat man from Calgary and a rheumatic dame on her way to take hot sulphur baths at St. Allwoods. She passed seedy farmhouses, primitive in construction, and big barns with moss plentifully clinging on roof and gable.
"I doubt if I should have known you either," she returned drily. Stella accompanied her brother to the store, where he gave an order for sundry goods. Then they went to the hotel to see if her trunks had arrived. Within a few yards of the fence which enclosed the grounds of St. Allwoods a man hailed Benton, and drew him a few steps aside.
You stick with me, Sis, and you'll wear diamonds." She laughed with him at this, and leaving the shady maple they walked up to the hotel, where Benton proposed that they get a canoe and paddle to where Roaring River flowed out of the lake half a mile westward, to kill the time that must elapse before the three-thirty train. The St. Allwoods' car was rolling out to Hopyard when they came back.
"All right." She dressed herself, took the elevator down to the lobby, instructed the night clerk to have a maid pack her trunk and send it by express to Hopyard, care of St. Allwoods Hotel on the lake. Then she walked out to the broad-stepped carriage entrance. A low-hung long-hooded, yellow car stood there, exhaust purring faintly.
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.
Northward opened a broad scope of lake level, girt about with tremendous peaks whose lower slopes were banked with thick forest. Somewhere distant along that lake shore was to be her home. As the car rolled over the four hundred yards between store and white-and-green St. Allwoods, she wondered if Charlie would be there to meet her.
Maybe Benton'll be in before night." She went back to the hotel. But St. Allwoods, in its dual capacity of health-and-pleasure resort, was a gilded shell, making a brave outward show, but capitalizing chiefly lake, mountains, and hot, mineral springs. Her room was a bare, cheerless place. She did not want to sit and ponder. Too much real grief hovered in the immediate background of her life.
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