“It would be the same if it were any other man,” she muttered.  “I can understand that feeling in you.  It’s so—­so typically masculine.”

“No, you’re wrong there, dead wrong,” Fyfe frowned.  “I’m not a self-sacrificing brute by any means.  Still, knowing that you’ll only live with me on sufferance, if you were honestly in love with a man that I felt was halfway decent, I’d put my feelings in my pocket and let you go.  If you cared enough for him to break every tie, to face the embarrassment of divorce, why, I’d figure you were entitled to your freedom and whatever happiness it might bring.  But Monohan—­hell, I don’t want to talk about him.  I trust you, Stella.  I’m banking on your own good sense.  And along with that good, natural common sense, you’ve got so many illusions.  About life in general, and about men.  They seem to have centered about this one particular man.  I can’t open your eyes or put you on the right track.  That’s a job for yourself.  All I can do is to sit back and wait.”

His voice trailed off huskily.

Stella put a hand on his shoulder.

“Do you care so much as all that, Jack?” she whispered.  “Even in spite of what you know?”

“For two years now,” he answered, “you’ve been the biggest thing in my life.  I don’t change easy; I don’t want to change.  But I’m getting hopeless.”

“I’m sorry, Jack,” she said.  “I can’t begin to tell you how sorry I am.  I didn’t love you to begin with—­”

“And you’ve always resented that,” he broke in.  “You’ve hugged that ghost of a loveless marriage to your bosom and sighed for the real romance you’d missed.  Well, maybe you did.  But you haven’t found it yet.  I’m very sure of that, although I doubt if I could convince you.”

“Let me finish,” she pleaded.  “You knew I didn’t love you—­that I was worn out and desperate and clutching at the life line you threw.  In spite of that,—­well, if I fight down this love, or fascination, or infatuation, or whatever it is,—­I’m not sure myself, except that it affects me strongly,—­can’t we be friends again?”

“Friends!  Oh, hell!” Fyfe exploded.

He came up out of his chair with a blaze in his eyes that startled her, caught her by the arm, and thrust her out the door.

“Friends?  You and I?” He sank his voice to a harsh whisper.  “My God—­friends!  Go to bed.  Good night.”

He pushed her into the hall, and the lock clicked between them.  For one confused instant Stella stood poised, uncertain.  Then she went into her bedroom and sat down, her keenest sensation one of sheer relief.  Already in those brief hours emotion had well-nigh exhausted her.  To be alone, to lie still and rest, to banish thought,—­that was all she desired.

She lay on her bed inert, numbed, all but her mind, and that traversed section by section in swift, consecutive progress all the amazing turns of her life since she first came to Roaring Lake.  There was neither method nor inquiry in this back-casting—­merely a ceaseless, involuntary activity of the brain.