Mostly she kept her mind from that disturbing introspection, because invariably it led her to vague dreaming of a future which she told herself—sometimes wistfully—could never be realized. She had shut the door on many things, it seemed to her now. But she had the sense to know that dwelling on what might have been only served to make her morbid, and did not in the least serve to alter the unalterable. She had chosen what seemed to her at the time the least of two evils, and she meant to abide steadfast by her choice.
Charlie Benton came to visit them. Strangely enough to Stella, who had never seen him on Roaring Lake, at least, dressed otherwise than as his loggers, he was sporting a natty gray suit, he was clean shaven, Oxford ties on his feet, a gentleman of leisure in his garb. If he had started on the down grade the previous winter, he bore no signs of it now, for he was the picture of ruddy vigor, clear-eyed, brown-skinned, alert, bubbling over with good spirits.
"Why, say, you look like a tourist," Fyfe remarked after an appraising glance.
"I'm making money, pulling ahead of the game, that's all," Benton retorted cheerfully. "I can afford to take a holiday now and then. I'm putting a million feet a month in the water. That's going some for small fry like me. Say, this house of yours is all to the good, Jack. It's got class, outside and in. Makes a man feel as if he had to live up to it, eh? Mackinaws and calked boots don't go with oriental rugs and oak floors."
"You should get a place like this as soon as possible then," Stella put in drily, "to keep you up to the mark, on edge aesthetically, one might put it."
"Not to say morally," Benton laughed. "Oh, maybe I'll get to it by and by, if the timber business holds up."
Later, when he and Stella were alone together, he said to her:
"You're lucky. You've got everything, and it comes without an effort. You sure showed good judgment when you picked Jack Fyfe. He's a thoroughbred."
"Oh, thank you," she returned, a touch of irony in her voice, a subtlety of inflection that went clean over Charlie's head.
He was full of inquiries about where they had been that winter, what they had done and seen. Also he brimmed over with his own affairs. He stayed overnight and went his way with a brotherly threat of making the Fyfe bungalow his headquarters whenever he felt like it.