"Well, you know about that better than I do," Benton said thoughtfully. "It all depends on how you _feel_." The poignant truth of that struck miserably home to her. It was not a matter of reason or logic, of her making any sacrifice for her conscience sake. It depended solely upon the existence of an emotion she could not definitely invoke. She was torn by so many emotions, not one of which she could be sure was the vital, the necessary one. Her heart did not cry out for Jack Fyfe, except in a pitying tenderness, as she used to feel for Jack Junior when he bumped and bruised himself. She had felt that before and held it too weak a crutch to lean upon. The nurse came in with a cup of broth for Benton, and Stella went away with a dumb ache in her breast, a leaden sinking of her spirits, and went out to sit on the porch steps. The minutes piled into hours, and noon came, when Linda wakened. Stella forced herself to swallow a cup of tea, to eat food; then she left Linda sitting with her husband and went back to the porch steps again. As she sat there, a man dressed in the blue shirt and mackinaw trousers and high, calked boots of the logger turned in off the road, a burly woodsman that she recognized as one of Jack Fyfe's crew. "Well," said he, "if it ain't Mrs. Jack. Say--ah--" He broke off suddenly, a perplexed look on his face, an uneasiness, a hesitation in his manner. "What is it, Barlow?" Stella asked kindly. "How is everything up the lake?" It was common enough in her experience, that temporary embarrassment of a logger before her. She knew them for men with boyish souls, boyish instincts, rude simplicities of heart. Long ago she had revised those first superficial estimates of them as gross, hulking brutes who worked hard and drank harder, coarsened and calloused by their occupation. They had their weaknesses, but their virtues of abiding loyalty, their reckless generosity, their simple directness, were great indeed. They took their lives in their hands on skid-road and spring-board, that such as she might flourish. They did not understand that, but she did. "What is it, Barlow?" she repeated. "Have you just come down the lake?" "Yes'm," he answered. "Say, Jack don't happen to be here, does he?" "No, he hasn't been here," she told him. The man's face fell. "What's wrong?" Stella demanded. She had a swift divination that something was wrong. "Oh, I dunno's anythin's wrong, particular," Barlow replied. "Only--well, Lefty he sent me down to see if Jack was at the Springs. We ain't seen him for a couple uh days." Her pulse quickened. "And he has not come down the lake?" "I guess not," the logger said. "Oh, I guess it's all right. Jack's pretty _skookum_ in the woods. Only Lefty got uneasy. It's desperate hot and smoky up there." "How did you come down? Are you going back soon?" she asked abruptly. "I got the _Waterbug_," Barlow told her. "I'm goin' right straight back."