to take this step for your own good, no
one can blame you. It needn't make any difference in our friendship."

On the threshold she turned on her heel. "Don't forget what I've said,"
she repeated. "Don't trust Monohan. Not an inch."

Stella flung herself angrily into a chair when the door closed on Linda
Abbey. Her eyes snapped. She resented being warned and cautioned, as if
she were some moral weakling who could not be trusted to make the most
obvious distinctions. Particularly did she resent having Monohan flung
in her teeth, when she was in a way to forget him, to thrust the strange
charm of the man forever out of her thoughts. Why, she asked bitterly,
couldn't other people do as Jack Fyfe had done: cut the Gordian knot at
one stroke and let it rest at that?

So Monohan was in Seattle? Would he try to see her?

Stella had not minced matters with herself when she left Roaring Lake.
Dazed and shaken by suffering, nevertheless she knew that she would not
always suffer, that in time she would get back to that normal state in
which the human ego diligently pursues happiness. In time the legal tie
between herself and Jack Fyfe would cease to exist. If Monohan cared for
her as she thought he cared, a year or two more or less mattered little.
They had all their lives before them. In the long run, the errors and
mistakes of that upheaval would grow dim, be as nothing. Jack Fyfe would
shrug his shoulders and forget, and in due time he would find a fitter
mate, one as loyal as he deserved. And why might not she, who had never
loved him, whose marriage to him had been only a climbing out of the
fire into the frying-pan?

So that with all her determination to make the most of her gift of song,
so that she would never again be buffeted by material urgencies in a
material world, Stella had nevertheless been listening with the ear of
her mind, so to speak, for a word from Monohan to say that he
understood, and that all was well.

Paradoxically, she had not expected to hear that word. Once in Seattle,
away from it all, there slowly grew upon her the conviction that in
Monohan's fine avowal and renunciation he had only followed the cue she
had given. In all else he had played his own hand. She couldn't forget
Billy Dale. If the motive behind that bloody culmination were thwarted
love, it was a thing to shrink from. It seemed to her now, forcing
herself to reason with cold-blooded logic, that Monohan desired her less
than he hat