Fyfe and Benton came to dinner more or less preoccupied, an odd mood for Charlie Benton. Afterwards they went into session behind the closed door of Fyfe's den. An hour or so later Benton went home. While she listened to the soft _chuff-a-chuff-a-chuff_ of the _Chickamin_ dying away in the distance, Fyfe came in and slumped down in a chair before the fire where a big fir stick crackled. He sat there silent, a half-smoked cigar clamped in one corner of his mouth, the lines of his square jaw in profile, determined, rigid. Stella eyed him covertly. There were times, in those moods of concentration, when sheer brute power seemed his most salient characteristic. Each bulging curve of his thick upper arm, his neck rising like a pillar from massive shoulders, indicated his power. Yet so well-proportioned was he that the size and strength of him was masked by the symmetry of his body, just as the deliberate immobility of his face screened the play of his feelings. Often Stella found herself staring at him, fruitlessly wondering what manner of thought and feeling that repression overlaid. Sometimes a tricksy, half-provoked desire to break through the barricade of his stoicism tempted her. She told herself that she ought to be thankful for his aloofness, his acquiescence in things as they stood. Yet there were times when she would almost have welcomed an outburst, a storm, anything rather than that deadly chill, enduring day after day. He seldom spoke to her now except of most matter-of-fact things. He played his part like a gentleman before others, but alone with her he withdrew into his shell. Stella was sitting back in the shadow, still studying him, measuring him in spite of herself by the Monohan yardstick. There wasn't much basis for comparison. It wasn't a question of comparison; the two men stood apart, distinctive, in every attribute. The qualities in Fyfe that she understood and appreciated, she beheld glorified in Monohan. Yet it was not, after all, a question of qualities. It was something more subtle, something of the heart which defied logical analysis. Fyfe had never been able to set her pulse dancing. She had never craved physical nearness to him, so that she ached with the poignancy of that craving. She had been passively contented with him, that was all. And Monohan had swept across her horizon like a flame. Why couldn't Jack Fyfe have inspired in her that headlong sort of passion? She smiled hopelessly. The tears were very close to her eyes. She loved Monohan; Monohan loved her. Fyfe loved her in his deliberate, repressed fashion and possessed her, according to the matrimonial design. And although now his possession was a hollow mockery, he would never give her up--not to Walter Monohan. She had that fatalistic conviction. How would it end in the long run?