She looked out along the shores piled high with broken ice and snow, through a misty air to distant mountains that lifted themselves imperiously aloof, white spires against the sky,--over a forest all draped in winter robes; shore, mountains, and forest alike were chill and hushed and desolate. The lake spread its forty-odd miles in a boomerang curve from Roaring Springs to Fort Douglas, a cold, lifeless gray. She sat a long time looking at that, and a dead weight seemed to settle upon her heart. For the second time that day she broke down. Not the shamed, indignant weeping of an hour earlier, but with the essence of all things forlorn and desolate in her choked sobs. She did not hear Jack Fyfe come in. She did not dream he was there, until she felt his hand gently on her shoulder and looked up. And so deep was her despondency, so keen the unassuaged craving for some human sympathy, some measure of understanding, that she made no effort to remove his hand. She was in too deep a spiritual quagmire to refuse any sort of aid, too deeply moved to indulge in analytical self-fathoming. She had a dim sense of being oddly comforted by his presence, as if she, afloat on uncharted seas, saw suddenly near at hand a safe anchorage and welcoming hands. Afterward she recalled that. As it was, she looked up at Fyfe and hid her wet face in her hands again. He stood silent a few seconds. When he did speak there was a peculiar hesitation in his voice. "What is it?" he said softly. "What's the trouble now?" Briefly she told him, the barriers of her habitual reserve swept aside before the essentially human need to share a burden that has grown too great to bear alone. "Oh, hell," Fyfe grunted, when she had finished. "This isn't any place for you at all." He slid his arm across her shoulders and tilted her face with his other hand so that her eyes met his. And she felt no desire to draw away or any of that old instinct to be on her guard against him. For all she knew--indeed, by all she had been told--Jack Fyfe was tarred with the same stick as her brother, but she had no thought of resisting him, no feeling of repulsion. "Will you marry me, Stella?" he asked evenly. "I can free you from this sort of thing forever." "How can I?" she returned. "I don't want to marry anybody. I don't love you. I'm not even sure I like you. I'm too miserable to think, even. I'm afraid to take a step like that. I should think you would be too." He shook his head. "I've thought a lot about it lately," he said. "It hasn't occurred to me to be afraid of how it may turn out. Why borrow trouble when there's plenty at hand? I don't care whether you love me or not, right now. You couldn't possibly be any worse off as my wife, could you?" "No," she admitted. "I don't see how I could."