AN UNEXPECTED MEETING

The formally worded wedding card arrived in due course. Following close came a letter from Linda Abbey, a missive that radiated friendliness and begged Stella to come a week before the date.

In the same mail was a characteristic note from Charlie which ran:

She capitulated at that and wrote saying that she would be there, and that she did not mind the trip alone in the least. She did not want Charlie asking pertinent questions about why she lived in such grubby quarters and practiced such strict economy in the matter of living.

Then there was the detail of arranging a break in her engagements, which ran continuously to the end of June. She managed that easily enough, for she was becoming too great a drawing card for managers to curtly override her wishes.

Almost before she realized it, June was at hand. Linda wrote again urgently, and Stella took the night boat for Vancouver a week before the wedding day. Linda met her at the dock with a machine. Mrs. Abbey was the essence of cordiality when she reached the big Abbey house on Vancouver's aristocratic "heights," where the local capitalists, all those fortunate climbers enriched by timber and mineral, grown wealthy in a decade through the great Coast boom, segregated themselves in "Villas" and "Places" and "Views," all painfully new and sometimes garish, striving for an effect in landscape and architecture which the very intensity of the striving defeated. They were well-meaning folk, however, the Abbeys included.

Stella could not deny that she enjoyed the luxury of the Abbey mÉnage, the little festive round which was shaping about Linda in these last days of her spinsterhood. She relished the change from unremitting work. It amused her to startle little groups with the range and quality of her voice, when they asked her to sing. They made a much ado over that, a genuine admiration that flattered Stella. It was easy for her to fall into the swing of that life; it was only a lapsing back to the old ways.

But she saw it now with a more critical vision. It was soft and satisfying and eminently desirable to have everything one wanted without the effort of striving for it, but a begging wheedling game on the part of these women. They were, she told herself rather harshly, an incompetent, helpless lot, dependent one and all upon some man's favor or affection, just as she herself had been all her life until the past few months. Some man had to work and scheme to pay the bills. She did not know why this line of thought should arise, neither did she so far forget herself as to voice these social heresies. But it helped to reconcile her with her new-found independence, to put a less formidable aspect on the long, hard grind that lay ahead of her before she could revel in equal affluence gained by her own efforts. All that they had she desired,—homes, servants, clothes, social standing,—but she did not want these things bestowed upon her as a favor by some man, the emoluments of sex.

She expected she would have to be on her guard with her brother, even to dissemble a little. But she found him too deeply engrossed in what to him was the most momentous event of his career, impatiently awaiting the day, rather dreading the publicity of it.

"Why in Sam Hill can't a man and a woman get married without all this fuss?" he complained once. "Why should we make our private affairs a spectacle for the whole town?"

"Principally because mamma has her heart set on a spectacle," Linda laughed. "She'd hold up her hands in horror if she heard you. Decorated bridal bower, high church dignitary, bridesmaids, orange blossoms, rice, and all. Mamma likes to show off. Besides, that's the way it's done in society. And the honeymoon."

They both giggled, as at some mirthful secret.

"Shall we tell her?" Linda nodded toward Stella.

"Sure," Benton said. "I thought you had."

"The happy couple will spend their honeymoon on a leisurely tour of the Southern and Eastern States, remaining for some weeks in Philadelphia, where the groom has wealthy and influential connections. It's all prepared for the pay-a-purs," Linda whispered with exaggerated secrecy behind her hand.

Benton snorted.

"Can you beat that?" he appealed to Stella.

"And all the time," Linda continued, "the happy couple, unknown to every one, will be spending their days in peace and quietness in their shanty at Halfway Point. My, but mamma would rave if she knew. Don't give us away, Stella. It seems so senseless to squander a lot of money gadding about on trains and living in hotels when we'd much rather be at home by ourselves. My husband's a poor young man, Stella. 'Pore but worthy.' He has to make his fortune before we start in spending it. I'm sick of all this spreading it on because dad has made a pile of money," she broke out impatiently. "Our living used to be simple enough when I was a kid. I think I can relish a little simplicity again for a change. Mamma's been trying for four years to marry me off to her conception of an eligible man. It didn't matter a hang about his essential qualities so long as he had money and an assured social position."

"Forget that," Charlie counseled slangily. "I have all the essential qualities, and I'll have the money and social position too; you watch my smoke."

"Conceited ninny," Linda smiled. But there was no reproof in her tone, only pure comradeship and affection, which Benton returned so openly and unaffectedly that Stella got up and left them with a pang of envy, a dull little ache in her heart. She had missed that. It had passed her by, that clean, spontaneous fusing of two personalities in the biggest passion life holds. Marriage and motherhood she had known, not as the flowering of love, not as an eager fulfilling of her natural destiny, but as something extraneous, an avenue of escape from an irksomeness of living, a weariness with sordid things, which she knew now had obsessed her out of all proportion to their reality. She had never seen that tenderness glow in the eyes of a mating pair that she did not envy them, that she did not feel herself hopelessly defrauded of her woman's heritage.

She went up to her room, moody, full of bitterness, and walked the thick-carpeted floor, the restlessness of her chafing spirit seeking the outlet of action.

"Thank the Lord I've got something to do, something that's worth doing," she whispered savagely. "If I can't have what I want, I can make my life embrace something more than just food and clothes and social trifling. If I had to sit and wait for each day to bring what it would, I believe I'd go clean mad."

A maid interrupted these self-communings to say that some one had called her over the telephone, and Stella went down to the library. She wasn't prepared for the voice that came over the line, but she recognized it instantly as Fyfe's.

"Listen, Stella," he said. "I'm sorry this has happened, but I can't very well avoid it now, without causing comment. I had no choice about coming to Vancouver. It was a business matter I couldn't neglect. And as luck would have it, Abbey ran into me as I got off the train. On account of your being there, of course, he insisted that I come out for dinner. It'll look queer if I don't, as I can't possibly get a return train for the Springs before nine-thirty this evening. I accepted without stuttering rather than leave any chance for the impression that I wanted to avoid you. Now, here's how I propose to fix it. I'll come out about two-thirty and pay a hurry-up five-minute call. Then I'll excuse myself to Mrs. Abbey for inability to join them at dinner—press of important business takes me to Victoria and so forth. That'll satisfy the conventions and let us both out. I called you so you won't be taken by surprise. Do you mind?"

"Of course not," she answered instantly. "Why should I?"

There was a momentary silence.

"Well," he said at last, "I didn't know how you'd feel about it. Anyway, it will only be for a few minutes, and it's unlikely to happen again."

Stella put the receiver back on the hook and looked at her watch. It lacked a quarter of two. In the room adjoining, Charlie and Linda were jubilantly wading through the latest "rag" song in a passable soprano and baritone, with Mrs. Abbey listening in outward resignation. Stella sat soberly for a minute, then joined them.

"Jack's in town," she informed them placidly, when the ragtime spasm ended. "He telephoned that he was going to snatch a few minutes between important business confabs to run out and see me."

"I could have told you that half an hour ago, my dear," Mrs. Abbey responded with playful archness. "Mr. Fyfe will dine with us this evening."

"Oh," Stella feigned surprise. "Why, he spoke of going to Victoria on the afternoon boat. He gave me the impression of mad haste—making a dash out here between breaths, as you might say."

"Oh, I hope he won't be called away on such short notice as that," Mrs. Abbey murmured politely.

She left the room presently. Out of one corner of her eye Stella saw Linda looking at her queerly. Charlie had turned to the window, staring at the blue blur of the Lions across the Inlet.

"It's a wonder Jack would leave the lake," he said suddenly, "with things the way they are. I've been hoping for rain ever since I've been down. I'll be glad when we're on the spot again, Linda."

"Wishing for rain?" Stella echoed. "Why?"

"Fire," he said shortly. "I don't suppose you realize it, but there's been practically no rain for two months. It's getting hot. A few weeks of dry, warm weather, and this whole country is ready to blow away. The woods are like a pile of shavings. That would be a fine wedding present—to be cleaned out by fire. Every dollar I've got's in timber."

"Don't be a pessimist," Linda said sharply.

"What makes you so uneasy now?" Stella asked thoughtfully. "There's always the fire danger in the dry months. That's been a bugaboo ever since I came to the lake."

"Yes, but never like it is this summer," Benton frowned. "Oh, well, no use borrowing trouble, I suppose."

Stella rose.

"When Jack comes, I'll be in the library," she said. "I'm going to read a while."

But the book she took up lay idle in her lap. She looked forward to that meeting with a curious mixture of reluctance and regret. She could not face it unmoved. No woman who has ever lain passive in a man's arms can ever again look into that man's eyes with genuine indifference. She may hate him or love him with a degree of intensity according to her nature, be merely friendly, or nurse a slow resentment. But there is always that intangible something which differentiates him from other men. Stella felt now a shyness of him, a little dread of him, less sureness of herself, as he swung out of the machine and took the house steps with that effortless lightness on his feet that she remembered so well.

She heard him in the hall, his deep voice mingling with the thin, penetrating tones of Mrs. Abbey. And then the library door opened, and he came in. Stella had risen, and stood uncertainly at one corner of a big reading table, repressing an impulse to fly, finding herself stricken with a strange recurrence of the feeling she had first disliked him for arousing in her,—a sense of needing to be on her guard, of impending assertion of a will infinitely more powerful than her own.

But that was, she told herself, only a state of mind, and Fyfe put her quickly at her ease. He came up to the table and seated himself on the edge of it an arm's length from her, swinging one foot free. He looked at her intently. There was no shadow of expression on his face, only in his clear eyes lurked a gleam of feeling.

"Well, lady," he said at length, "you're looking fine. How goes everything?"

"Fairly well," she answered.

"Seems odd, doesn't it, to meet like this?" he ventured. "I'd have dodged it, if it had been politic. As it is, there's no harm done, I imagine. Mrs. Abbey assured me we'd be free from interruption. If the exceedingly cordial dame had an inkling of how things stand between us, I daresay she'd be holding her breath about now."

"Why do you talk like that, Jack?" Stella protested nervously.

"Well, I have to say something," he remarked, after a moment's reflection. "I can't sit here and just look at you. That would be rude, not to say embarrassing."

Stella bit her lip.

"I don't see why we can't talk like any other man and woman for a few minutes," she observed.

"I do," he said quietly. "You know why, too, if you stop to think. I'm the same old Jack Fyfe, Stella. I don't think much where you are concerned; I just feel. And that doesn't lend itself readily to impersonal chatter."

"How do you feel?" she asked, meeting his gaze squarely. "If you don't hate me, you must at least rather despise me."

"Neither," he said slowly. "I admire your grit, lady. You broke away from everything and made a fresh start. You asserted your own individuality in a fashion that rather surprised me. Maybe the incentive wasn't what it might have been, but the result is, or promises to be. I was only a milestone. Why should I hate or despise you because you recognized that and passed on? I had no business setting myself up for the end of your road instead of the beginning. I meant to have it that way until the kid—well, Fate took a hand there. Pshaw," he broke off with a quick gesture, "let's talk about something else."

Stella laid one hand on his knee. Unbidden tears were crowding up in her gray eyes.

"You were good to me," she whispered. "But just being good wasn't enough for a perverse creature like me. I couldn't be a sleek pussy-cat, comfortable beside your fire. I'm full of queer longings. I want wings. I must be a variation from the normal type of woman. Our marriage didn't touch the real me at all, Jack. It only scratched the surface. And sometimes I'm afraid to look deep, for fear of what I'll see. Even if another man hadn't come along and stirred up a temporary tumult in me, I couldn't have gone on forever."

"A temporary tumult," Fyfe mused. "Have you thoroughly chucked that illusion? I knew you would, of course, but I had no idea how long it would take you."

"Long ago," she answered. "Even before I left you, I was shaky about that. There were things I couldn't reconcile. But pride wouldn't let me admit it. I can't even explain it to myself."

"I can," he said, a little sadly. "You've never poured out that big, warm heart of yours on a man. It's there, always has been there, those concentrated essences of passion. Every unattached man's a possible factor, a potential lover. Nature has her own devices to gain her end. I couldn't be the one. We started wrong. I saw the mistake of that when it was too late. Monohan, a highly magnetic animal, came along at a time when you were peculiarly and rather blindly receptive. That's all. Sex—you have it in a word. It couldn't stand any stress, that sort of attraction. I knew it would only last until you got one illuminating glimpse of the real man of him. But I don't want to talk about him. He'll keep. Sometime you'll really love a man, Stella, and he'll be a very lucky mortal. There's an erratic streak in you, lady, but there's a bigger streak that's fine and good and true. You'd have gone through with it to the bitter end, if Jack Junior hadn't died. The weaklings don't do that. Neither do they cut loose as you did, burning all their economic bridges behind them. Do you know that it was over a month before I found out that you'd turned your private balance back into my account? I suppose there was a keen personal satisfaction in going on your own and making good from the start. Only I couldn't rest until—until—"

His voice trailed huskily off into silence. The gloves in his left hand were doubled and twisted in his uneasy fingers. Stella's eyes were blurred.

"Well, I'm going," he said shortly. "Be good."

He slipped off the table and stood erect, a wide, deep-chested man, tanned brown, his fair hair with its bronze tinge lying back in a smooth wave from his forehead, blue eyes bent on her, hot with a slumbering fire.

Without warning, he caught her close in his arms so that she could feel the pounding of his heart against her breast, kissed her cheeks, her hair, the round, firm white neck of her, with lips that burned. Then he held her off at arm's length.

"That's how I care," he said defiantly. "That's how I want you. No other way. I'm a one-woman man. Some time you may love like that, and if you do, you'll know how I feel. I've watched you sleeping beside me and ached because I couldn't kindle the faintest glow of the real thing in you. I'm sick with a miserable sense of failure, the only thing I've ever failed at, and the biggest, most complete failure I can conceive of,—to love a woman in every way desirable; to have her and yet never have her."

He caught up his hat, and the door clicked shut behind him. A minute later Stella saw him step into the tonneau of the car. He never looked back.

And she fled to her own room, stunned, half-frightened, wholly amazed at this outburst. Her face was damp with his lip-pressure, damp and warm. Her arms tingled with the grip of his. The blood stood in her cheeks like a danger signal, flooding in hot, successive waves to the roots of her thick, brown hair.

"If I thought—I could," she whispered into her pillow, "I'd try. But I daren't. I'm afraid. It's just a mood, I know it is. I've had it before. A—ah! I'm a spineless jellyfish, a weathercock that whirls to every emotional breeze. And I won't be. I'll stand on my own feet if I can—so help me God, I will!"