She never dreamed that Jack Fyfe could possibly have foreseen in Walter
Monohan a dangerous factor in their lives. A man is not supposed to have
uncanny intuitions, even when his wife is a wonderfully attractive
woman who does not care for him except in a friendly sort of way.
Stella herself had ample warning. From the first time of meeting, the
man's presence affected her strangely, made an appeal to her that no man
had ever made. She felt it sitting beside him in the plunging launch
that day when Roaring Lake reached its watery arms for her. There was
seldom a time when they were together that she did not feel it. And she
pitted her will against it, as something to be conquered and crushed.
There was no denying the man's personal charm in the ordinary sense of
the word. He was virile, handsome, cultured, just such a man as she
could easily have centered her heart upon in times past,--just such a
man as can set a woman's heart thrilling when he lays siege to her. If
he had made an open bid for Stella's affection, she, entrenched behind
all the accepted canons of her upbringing, would have recoiled from him,
viewed him with wholly distrustful eyes.
But he did nothing of the sort. He was a friend, or at least he became
so. Inevitably they were thrown much together. There was a continual
informal running back and forth between Fyfe's place and Abbey's.
Monohan was a lily of the field, although it was common knowledge on
Roaring Lake that he was a heavy stock-holder in the Abbey-Monohan
combination. At any rate, he was holidaying on the lake that summer.
There had grown up a genuine intimacy between Linda and Stella. There
were always people at the Abbeys'; sometimes a few guests at the Fyfe
bungalow. Stella's marvellous voice served to heighten her popularity.
The net result of it all was that in the following three months source
three days went by that she did not converse with Monohan.
She could not help making comparisons between the two men. They stood
out in marked contrast, in manner, physique, in everything. Where Fyfe
was reserved almost to taciturnity, impassive-featured, save for that
whimsical gleam that was never wholly absent from his keen blue eyes,
Monohan talked with facile ease, with wonderful expressiveness of face.
He was a finished product of courteous generations. Moreover, he had
been everywhere, done a little of everything, acquired in his manner
something of the versatility of his experience. Physically he was fit as
any logger in the camps, a big, active-bodied, clear-eyed, ruddy man.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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