She went out into the living room, walked to a window, stood there drumming on the pane with nervous fingers.  Dusk was falling outside; a dusk was creeping over her.  She shuddered.

Fyfe came up behind her, put his hands on her shoulders, and turned her so that she faced him.

“I wish I could help, Stella,” he whispered.  “I wish I could make you feel less forlorn.  Poor little kiddies—­both of you.”

She shook off his hands, not because she rebelled against his touch, against his sympathy, merely because she had come to that nervous state where she scarce realized what she did.

“Oh,” she choked, “I can’t bear it.  My baby, my little baby boy.  The one bright spot that’s left, and he has to suffer like that.  If he dies, it’s the end of everything for me.”

Fyfe stared at her.  The warm, pitying look on his face ebbed away, hardened into his old, mask-like absence of expression.

“No,” he said quietly, “it would only be the beginning.  Lord God, but this has been a day.”

He whirled about with a quick gesture of his hands, a harsh, raspy laugh that was very near a sob, and left her.  Twenty minutes later, when Stella was irresistibly drawn back to the bedroom, she found him sitting sober and silent, looking at his son.

A little past midnight Jack Junior died.

CHAPTER XIX

FREE AS THE WIND

Stella sat watching the gray lines of rain beat down on the asphalt, the muddy rivulets that streamed along the gutter.  A forlorn sighing of wind in the bare boughs of a gaunt elm that stood before her window reminded her achingly of the wind drone among the tall firs.

A ghastly two weeks had intervened since Jack Junior’s little life blinked out.  There had been wild moments when she wished she could keep him company on that journey into the unknown.  But grief seldom kills.  Sometimes it hardens.  Always it works a change, a greater or less revamping of the spirit.  It was so with Stella Fyfe, although she was not keenly aware of any forthright metamorphosis.  She was, for the present, too actively involved in material changes.

The storm and stress of that period between her yielding to the lure of Monohan’s personality and the burial of her boy had sapped her of all emotional reaction.  When they had performed the last melancholy service for him and went back to the bungalow at Cougar Point, she was as physically exhausted, as near the limit of numbed endurance in mind and body as it is possible for a young and healthy woman to become.  And when a measure of her natural vitality re-asserted itself, she laid her course.  She could no more abide the place where she was than a pardoned convict can abide the prison that has restrained him.  It was empty now of everything that made life tolerable, the hushed rooms a constant reminder of her loss.  She would catch herself listening for that baby voice, for those pattering footsteps, and realize with a sickening pang that she would never hear them again.