ell, it would upset so many things."

"You needn't be uneasy," Stella answered coldly. "There isn't any
foundation for scandal. There won't be."

"I don't know," Linda returned, "Walter Monohan came to Seattle a boat
ahead of me. In fact, that's largely why I came."

Stella flushed angrily.

"Well, what of that?" she demanded. "His movements are nothing to me."

"I don't know," Linda rejoined. She had taken off her gloves and was
rolling them nervously in a ball. Now she dropped them and impulsively
grasped Stella's hands.

"Stella, Stella," she cried. "Don't get that hurt, angry look. I don't
like to say these things to you, but I feel that I have to. I'm worried,
and I'm afraid for you and your husband, for Charlie and myself, for all
of us together. Walter Monohan is as dangerous as any man who's
unscrupulous and rich and absolutely self-centered can possibly be. I
know the glamour of the man. I used to feel it myself. It didn't go very
far with me, because his attention wandered away from me before my
feelings were much involved, and I had a chance to really fathom them
and him. He has a queer gift of making women care for him, and he trades
on it deliberately. He doesn't play fair; he doesn't mean to. Oh, I know
so many cruel things, despicable things, he's done. Don't look at me
like that, Stella. I'm not saying this just to wound you. I'm simply
putting you on your guard. You can't play with fire and not get burned.
If you've been nursing any feeling for Walter Monohan, crush it, cut it
out, just as you'd have a surgeon cut out a cancer. Entirely apart from
any question of Jack Fyfe, don't let this man play any part whatever in
your life. You'll be sorry if you do. There's not a man or woman whose
relations with Monohan have been intimate enough to enable them to
really know the man and his motives who doesn't either hate or fear or
despise him, and sometimes all three."

"That's a sweeping indictment," Stella said stiffly. "And you're very
earnest. Yet I can hardly take your word at its face value. If he's so
impossible a person, how does it come that you and your people
countenanced him socially? Besides, it's all rather unnecessary, Linda.
I'm not the least bit likely to do anything that will reflect on your
prospective husband, which is what it simmers down to, isn't it? I've
been pulled and hauled this way and that ever since I've been on the
coast, simply because I was dependent on some one else--fir