being Howard's
suggestion,--and she took her leave.

Upon the Monday following Stella stood for the first time in a fierce
white glare that dazzled her and so shut off partially her vision of the
rows and rows of faces. She went on with a horrible slackness in her
knees, a dry feeling in her throat; and she was not sure whether she
would sing or fly. When she had finished her first song and bowed
herself into the wings, she felt her heart leap and hammer at the
hand-clapping that grew and grew till it was like the beat of ocean
surf.

Howard came running to meet her.

"You've sure got 'em going," he laughed. "Fine work. Go out and give 'em
some more."

In time she grew accustomed to these things, to the applause she never
failed to get, to the white beam that beat down from the picture cage,
to the eager, upturned faces in the first rows. Her confidence grew;
ambition began to glow like a flame within her. She had gone through
the primary stages of voice culture, and she was following now a method
of practice which produced results. She could see and feel that herself.
Sometimes the fear that her voice might go as it had once gone would
make her tremble. But that, her teacher assured her, was a remote
chance.

So she gained in those weeks something of her old poise. Inevitably, she
was very lonely at times. But she fought against that with the most
effective weapon she knew,--incessant activity. She was always busy.
There was a rented piano now sitting in the opposite corner from the gas
stove on which she cooked her meals. Howard kept his word. She "pulled
business," and he raised her to forty a week and offered her a contract
which she refused, because other avenues, bigger and better than singing
in a motion-picture house, were tentatively opening.

December was waning when she came to Seattle. In the following weeks her
only contact with the past, beyond the mill of her own thoughts, was an
item in the _Seattle Times_ touching upon certain litigation in which
Fyfe was involved. Briefly, Monohan, under the firm name of the
Abbey-Monohan Timber Company, was suing Fyfe for heavy damages for the
loss of certain booms of logs blown up and set adrift at the mouth of
the Tyee River. There was appended an account of the clash over the
closed channel and the killing of Billy Dale. No one had been brought to
book for that yet. Any one of sixty men might have fired the shot.

It made Stella wince, for it took her bac