Fyfe looked at it and at her, a little chuckle deep in his throat.

“Nineteen thousand, five hundred,” he laughed.  “Well, that’s quite a stake for you.  But if you go partners with me, what about your singing?”

“I don’t see how I can have my cake and eat it, too,” she said lightly.  “I don’t feel quite so eager for a career as I did.”

“Well, we’ll see,” he said.  “That light of yours shouldn’t be hidden under a bushel.  And still, I don’t like the idea of you being away from me, which a career implies.”

He put the check back in the envelope, smiling oddly to himself, and tucked it back in her bosom.  She caught and pressed his hand there, against the soft flesh.

“Won’t you use it, Jack?” she pleaded.  “Won’t it help?  Don’t let any silly pride influence you.  There mustn’t ever be anything like that between us again.”

“There won’t be,” he smiled.  “Frankly, if I need it, I’ll use it.  But that’s a matter there’s plenty of time to decide.  You see, although technically I may be broke, I’m a long way from the end of my tether.  I think I’ll have my working outfit clear, and the country’s full of timber.  I’ve got a standing in the business that neither fire nor anything else can destroy.  No, I haven’t any false pride about the money, dear.  But the money part of our future is a detail.  With the incentive I’ve got now to work and plan, it won’t take me five years to be a bigger toad in the timber puddle than I ever was.  You don’t know what a dynamo I am when I get going.”

“I don’t doubt that,” she said proudly.  “But the money’s yours, if you need it.”

“I need something else a good deal more right now,” he laughed.  “That’s something to eat.  Aren’t you hungry, Stella?  Wouldn’t you like a cup of coffee?”

“I’m famished,” she admitted—­the literal truth.  The vaulting uplift of spirit, that glad little song that kept lilting in her heart, filled her with peace and contentment, but physically she was beginning to experience acute hunger.  She recalled that she had eaten scarcely anything that day.

“We’ll go down to the camp,” Fyfe suggested.  “The cook will have something left.  We’re camping like pioneers down there.  The shacks were all burned, and somebody sank the cookhouse scow.”

They went down the path to the bay, hand in hand, feeling their way through that fire-blackened area, under a black sky.

A red eye glowed ahead of them, a fire on the beach around which men squatted on their haunches or lay stretched on their blankets, sooty-faced fire fighters, a weary group.  The air was rank with smoke wafted from the burning woods.

The cook’s fire was dead, and that worthy was humped on his bed-roll smoking a pipe.  But he had cold meat and bread, and he brewed a pot of coffee on the big fire for them, and Stella ate the plain fare, sitting in the circle of tired loggers.

“Poor fellows, they look worn out,” she said, when they were again traversing that black road to the bungalow.