While she sat there, drawn-faced with the cold, thinking rather amazedly these things which she told herself she had no right to think, the launch slipped into the quiet nook of Cougar Bay and slowed down to the float.

Monohan helped her out, threw off the canoe’s painter, and climbed back into the launch.

“You’re as wet as I am,” Stella said.  “Won’t you come up to the house and get a change of clothes?  I haven’t even thanked you.”

“Nothing to be thanked for,” he smiled up at her.  “Only please remember not to get offshore in a canoe again.  I mightn’t be handy the next time—­and Roaring Lake’s as fickle as your charming sex.  All smiles one minute, storming the next.  No, I won’t stay this time, thanks.  A little wet won’t hurt me.  I wasn’t in the water long enough to get chilled, you know.  I’ll be home in half an hour.  Run along and get dressed, Mrs. Fyfe, and drink something hot to drive that chill away.  Good-by.”

Stella went up to the house, her hand tingling with his parting grip.  Over and above the peril she had escaped rose an uneasy vision of a greater peril to her peace of mind.  The platitudes of soul-affinity, of irresistible magnetic attraction, of love that leaped full-blown into reality at the touch of a hand or the glance of an eye, she had always viewed with distrust, holding them the weaknesses of weak, volatile natures.  But there was something about this man which had stirred her, nothing that he said or did, merely some elusive, personal attribute.  She had never undergone any such experience, and she puzzled over it now.  A chance stranger, and his touch could make her pulse leap.  It filled her with astonished dismay.

Afterward, dry-clad and warm, sitting in her pet chair, Jack Junior cooing at her from a nest among cushions on the floor, the natural reaction set in, and she laughed at herself.  When Fyfe came home, she told him lightly of her rescue.

He said nothing at first, only sat drumming on his chair-arm, his eyes steady on her.

“That might have cost you your life,” he said at last.  “Will you remember not to drift offshore again?”

“I rather think I shall,” she responded.  “It wasn’t a pleasant experience.”

“Monohan, eh?” he remarked after another interval.  “So he’s on Roaring Lake again.”

“Do you know him?” she asked.

“Yes,” he replied briefly.

For a minute or so longer he sat there, his face wearing its habitual impassiveness.  Then he got up, kissed her with a queer sort of intensity, and went put.  Stella gazed after him, mildly surprised.  It wasn’t quite in his usual manner.

CHAPTER XV

A RESURRECTION