Later the doctor confirmed this. He made light of the wound. One
couldn't kill a young man as full of vitality as Charlie Benton with an
axe, he informed Stella with an optimistic smile. Which lifted one
burden from her mind.
The night nurse went away, and another from the hospital took her place.
Benton slept; Linda slept. The house was very quiet. To Stella, brooding
in that kitchen chair, it became oppressive, that funeral hush. When it
was drawing near ten o'clock, she walked up the road past the corner
store and post-office, and so out to the end of the wharf.
The air was hot and heavy, pungent, gray with the smoke. Farther along,
St. Allwoods bulked mistily amid its grounds. The crescent of shore line
half a mile distant was wholly obscured. Up over the eastern mountain
range the sun, high above the murk, hung like a bloody orange, rayless
and round. No hotel guests strolled by pairs and groups along the bank.
She could understand that no one would come for pleasure into that
suffocating atmosphere. Caught in that great bowl of which the lake
formed the watery bottom, the smoke eddied and rolled like a cloud of
mist.
She stood a while gazing at the glassy surface of the lake where it
spread to her vision a little way beyond the piles. Then she went back
to the green cottage.
Benton lifted alert, recognizing eyes when she peeped in the bedroom
door.
"Hello, Sis," he greeted in strangely subdued tones. "When did you blow
in? I thought you'd deserted the sinking ship completely.
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