ed
quickly. Stella turned her head. Jack Fyfe stood in the doorway. His
face was fixed in its habitual mask. He was biting the end off a cigar.
He struck a match and put it to the cigar end with steady fingers as he
walked slowly across the big room.

"I hear the kid peeping," he said to Stella quite casually, "and I
noticed Martha outside as I came in. Better go see what's up with him."

Trained to repression, schooled in self-control, Stella rose to obey,
for under the smoothness of his tone there was the iron edge of command.
Her heart apparently ceased to beat. She tried to smile, but she knew
that her face was tear-wet. She knew that Jack Fyfe had seen and
understood. She had done no wrong, but a terrible apprehension of
consequences seized her, a fear that tragedy of her own making might
stalk grimly in that room.

In this extremity she banked with implicit faith on the man she had
married rather than the man she loved. For the moment she felt
overwhelmingly glad that Jack Fyfe was iron--cool, unshakable. He would
never give an inch, but he would never descend to any sordid scene. She
could not visualize him the jealous, outraged husband, breathing the
conventional anathema, but there were elements unreckonable in that
room. She knew instinctively that Fyfe once aroused would be deadly in
anger and she could not vouch for Monohan's temper under the strain of
feeling. That was why she feared.

So she lingered a second or two outside the door, quaking, but there
arose only the sound of Fyfe's heavy body settling into a leather chair,
and following that the low, even rumble of his voice. She could not
distinguish words. The tone sounded ordinary, conversational. She prayed
that his intent was to ignore the situation, that Monohan would meet him
halfway in that effort. Afterward there would be a reckoning. But for
herself she neither thought nor feared. It was a problem to be faced,
that was all. And so, the breath of her coming in short, quick
respirations, she went to her room. There was no wailing from the
nursery. She had known that.

Sitting beside a window, chin in hand, her lower lip compressed between
her teeth, she saw Fyfe, after the lapse of ten minutes, leave by the
front entrance, stopping to chat a minute with Linda and Charlie Benton,
who were moving slowly toward the house. Stella rose to her feet and
dabbed at her face with a powdered chamois. She couldn't let Monohan go
like that; her heart cri