"It's lucky for me you happened along," Stella remarked, when she was ensconced behind the bulkhead. "I was getting so cold. I don't know how much longer I could have stood it." "Thank the good glasses that picked you out. You were only a speck on the water, you know, when I sighted you first." He kept silent after that. All his faculties were centered on the seas ahead which rolled up before the sharp cutwater of the launch. He was making time and still trying to avoid boarding seas. When a big one lifted ahead, he slowed down. He kept one hand on the throttle control, whistling under his breath disconnected snatches of song. Stella studied his profile, clean-cut as a cameo and wholly pleasing. He was almost as big-bodied as Jack Fyfe, and full four inches taller. The wet shirt clinging close to his body outlined well-knit shoulders, ropy-muscled arms. He could easily have posed for a Viking, so strikingly blond was he, with fair, curly hair. She judged that he might be around thirty, yet his face was altogether boyish. Sitting there beside him, shivering in her wet clothes, she found herself wondering what magnetic quality there could be about a man that focussed a woman's attention upon him whether she willed it or no. Why should she feel an oddly-disturbing thrill at the mere physical nearness of this fair-haired stranger? She did. There was no debating that. And she wondered--wondered if a bolt of that lightning she had dreaded ever since her marriage was about to strike her now. She hoped not. All her emotions had lain fallow. If Jack Fyfe had no power to stir her,--and she told herself Jack had so failed, without asking herself why,--then some other man might easily accomplish that, to her unutterable grief. She had told herself many a time that no more terrible plight could overtake her than to love and be loved and sit with hands folded, foregoing it all. She shrank from so tragic an evolution. It meant only pain, the ache of unfulfilled, unattainable desires. If, she reflected cynically, this man beside her stood for such a motif in her life, he might better have left her out in the swamped canoe. 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."