So she gained in those weeks something of her old poise.  Inevitably, she was very lonely at times.  But she fought against that with the most effective weapon she knew,—­incessant activity.  She was always busy.  There was a rented piano now sitting in the opposite corner from the gas stove on which she cooked her meals.  Howard kept his word.  She “pulled business,” and he raised her to forty a week and offered her a contract which she refused, because other avenues, bigger and better than singing in a motion-picture house, were tentatively opening.

December was waning when she came to Seattle.  In the following weeks her only contact with the past, beyond the mill of her own thoughts, was an item in the Seattle Times touching upon certain litigation in which Fyfe was involved.  Briefly, Monohan, under the firm name of the Abbey-Monohan Timber Company, was suing Fyfe for heavy damages for the loss of certain booms of logs blown up and set adrift at the mouth of the Tyee River.  There was appended an account of the clash over the closed channel and the killing of Billy Dale.  No one had been brought to book for that yet.  Any one of sixty men might have fired the shot.

It made Stella wince, for it took her back to that dreadful day.  She could not bear to think that Billy Dale’s blood lay on her and Monohan, neither could she stifle an uneasy apprehension that something more grievous yet might happen on Roaring Lake.  But at least she had done what she could.  If she were the flame, she had removed herself from the powder magazine.  Fyfe had pulled his cedar crew off the Tyee before she left.  If aggression came, it must come from one direction.

They were both abstractions now, she tried to assure herself.  The glamour of Monohan was fading, and she could not say why.  She did not know if his presence would stir again all that old tumult of feeling, but she did know that she was cleaving to a measure of peace, of serenity of mind, and she did not want him or any other man to disturb it.  She told herself that she had never loved Jack Fyfe.  She recognized in him a lot that a woman is held to admire, but there were also qualities in him that had often baffled and sometimes frightened her.  She wondered sometimes what he really thought of her and her actions, why, when she had been nerved to a desperate struggle for her freedom, if she could gain it no other way, he had let her go so easily?

After all, she reflected cynically, love comes and goes, but one is driven to pursue material advantages while life lasts.  And she wondered, even while the thought took form in her mind, how long she would retain that point of view.

CHAPTER XX

ECHOES

In the early days of February Stella had an unexpected visitor.  The landlady called her to the common telephone, and when she took up the receiver, Linda Abbey’s voice came over the wire.