“I’m sorry,” Stella repeated.

She said it rather mechanically.  Her mind was spinning a thread, upon which, strung like beads, slid all the manifold succession of things that had happened since she came first to Roaring Lake.  Linda’s voice, continuing, broke into her thoughts.

“I suppose I shouldn’t be croaking into your ear like a bird of ill omen, when you have to throw yourself heart and soul into that concert to-morrow,” she said contritely.  “I wonder why that Ancient Mariner way of seeking relief from one’s troubles by pouring them into another ear is such a universal trait?  You aren’t vitally concerned, after all, and I am.  Let’s have that tea, dear, and talk about less grievous things.  I still have one or two trifles to get in the shops too.”

After they had finished the food that Stella ordered sent up, they went out together.  Later Stella saw her off on the train.

“Good-by, dear,” Linda said from the coach window.  “I’m just selfish enough to wish you were going back with me; I wish you could sit with me on the bank of the lake, aching and longing for your man up there in the smoke as I ache and long for mine.  Misery loves company.”

Stella’s eyes were clouded as the train pulled out.  Something in Linda Benton’s parting words made her acutely lonely, dispirited, out of joint with the world she was deliberately fashioning for herself.  Into Linda’s life something big and elemental had come.  The butterfly of yesterday had become the strong man’s mate of to-day.  Linda’s heart was unequivocally up there in the smoke and flame with her man, fighting for their mutual possessions, hoping with him, fearing for him, longing for him, secure in the knowledge that if nothing else was left them, they had each other.  It was a rare and beautiful thing to feel like that.  And beyond that sorrowful vision of what she lacked to achieve any real and enduring happiness, there loomed also a self-torturing conviction that she herself had set in motion those forces which now threatened ruin for her brother and Jack Fyfe.

There was no logical proof of this.  Only intuitive, subtle suggestions gleaned here and there, shadowy finger-posts which pointed to Monohan as a deadly hater and with a score chalked up against Fyfe to which she had unconsciously added.  He had desired her, and twice Fyfe had treated him like an urchin caught in mischief.  She recalled how Monohan sprang at him like a tiger that day on the lake shore.  She realized how bitter a humiliation it must have been to suffer that sardonic cuffing at Fyfe’s hands.  Monohan wasn’t the type of man who would ever forget or forgive either that or the terrible grip on his throat.

Even at the time she had sensed this and dreaded what it might ultimately lead to.  Even while her being answered eagerly to the physical charm of him, she had fought against admitting to herself what desperate intent might have lain back of the killing of Billy Dale,—­a shot that Lefty Howe declared was meant for Fyfe.  She had long outgrown Monohan’s lure, but if he had come to her or written to make out a case for himself when she first went to Seattle, she would have accepted his word against anything.  Her heart would have fought for him against the logic of her brain.