The snapping of that last link served to deepen and widen the gulf between her and Fyfe.  He went about his business grave and preoccupied.  They seldom talked together.  She knew that his boy had meant a lot to him; but he had his work.  He did not have to sit with folded hands and think until thought drove him into the bogs of melancholy.

And so the break came.  With desperate abruptness Stella told him that she could not stay, that feeling as she did, she despised herself for unwilling acceptance of everything where she could give nothing in return, that the original mistake of their marriage would never be rectified by a perpetuation of that mistake.

“What’s the use, Jack?” she finished.  “You and I are so made that we can’t be neutral.  We’ve got to be thoroughly in accord, or we have to part.  There’s no chance for us to get back to the old way of living.  I don’t want to; I can’t.  I could never be complaisant and agreeable again.  We might as well come to a full stop, and each go his own way.”

She had braced herself for a clash of wills.  There was none.  Fyfe listened to her, looked at her long and earnestly, and in the end made a quick, impatient gesture with his hands.

“Your life’s your own to make what you please of, now that the kid’s no longer a factor,” he said quietly.  “What do you want to do?  Have you made any plans?”

“I have to live, naturally,” she replied.  “Since I’ve got my voice back, I feel sure I can turn that to account.  I should like to go to Seattle first and look around.  It can be supposed I have gone visiting, until one or the other of us takes a decisive legal step.”

“That’s simple enough,” he returned, after a minute’s reflection.  “Well, if it has to be, for God’s sake let’s get it over with.”

And now it was over with.  Fyfe remarked once that with them luckily it was not a question of money.  But for Stella it was indeed an economic problem.  When she left Roaring Lake, her private account contained over two thousand dollars.  Her last act in Vancouver was to re-deposit that to her husband’s credit.  Only so did she feel that she could go free of all obligation, clean-handed, without stultifying herself in her own eyes.  She had treasured as a keepsake the only money she had ever earned in her life, her brother’s check for two hundred and seventy dollars, the wages of that sordid period in the cookhouse.  She had it now.  Two hundred and seventy dollars capital.  She hadn’t sold herself for that.  She had given honest value, double and treble, in the sweat of her brow.  She was here now, in a five-dollar-a-week housekeeping room, foot-loose, free as the wind.  That was Fyfe’s last word to her.  He had come with her to Seattle and waited patiently at a hotel until she found a place to live.  Then he had gone away without protest.

“Well, Stella,” he had said, “I guess this is the end of our experiment.  In six months,—­under the State law,—­you can be legally free by a technicality.  So far as I’m concerned, you’re free as the wind right now.  Good luck to you.”