the be-scarfed yellow head enter and Monohan's silk hat
follow. Then she relaxed, but she had little appetite for her food. A
hot wave of shamed disgust kept coming over her. She felt sick,
physically revolted. Very likely Monohan had put her in _that_ class, in
his secret thought. She was glad when the evening ended, and the Howards
left her at her own doorstep.

On the carpet where it had been thrust by the postman under the door, a
white square caught her eye, and she picked it up before she switched on
the light. And she got a queer little shock when the light fell on the
envelope, for it was addressed in Jack Fyfe's angular handwriting.

She tore it open. It was little enough in the way of a letter, a couple
of lines scrawled across a sheet of note-paper.

"_Dear Girl:_

"I was in Seattle a few days ago and heard you sing. Here's hoping
good luck rides with you.

"JACK."

Stella sat down by the window. Outside, the ever-present Puget Sound
rain drove against wall and roof and sidewalk, gathered in wet,
glistening pools in the street. Through that same window she had watched
Jack Fyfe walk out of her life three months ago without a backward look,
sturdily, silently, uncomplaining. He hadn't whined, he wasn't whining
now,--only flinging a cheerful word out of the blank spaces of his own
life into the blank spaces of hers. Stella felt something warm and wet
steal down her cheeks.

She crumpled the letter with a sudden, spasmodic clenching of her hand.
A lump rose chokingly in her throat. She stabbed at the light switch and
threw herself on the bed, sobbing her heart's cry in the dusky quiet.
And she could not have told why, except that she had been overcome by a
miserably forlorn feeling; all the mental props she relied upon were
knocked out from under her. Somehow those few scrawled words had flung
swiftly before her, like a picture on a screen, a vision of her baby
toddling uncertainly across the porch of the white bungalow. And she
could not bear to think of that!

* * * * *

When the elm before her window broke into leaf, and the sodden winter
skies were transformed into a warm spring vista of blue, Stella was
singing a special engagement in a local vaudeville house that boasted a
"big time" bill. She had stepped up. The silvery richness of her voice
had carried her name already beyond local boundaries, as the singing
master under whom she studied prophesi