own people, so that Charlie will have some of the opportunities dad can so easily put in his way.  Charlie isn’t rich.  He hasn’t done anything, according to the Abbey standard, but make a fair start.  Dad’s patronizing as sin, and mother merely tolerates the idea because she knows that I’ll marry Charlie in any case, opposition or no opposition.  I came over expressly to warn you, Stella.  Anything like scandal now would be—­well, it would upset so many things.”

“You needn’t be uneasy,” Stella answered coldly.  “There isn’t any foundation for scandal.  There won’t be.”

“I don’t know,” Linda returned, “Walter Monohan came to Seattle a boat ahead of me.  In fact, that’s largely why I came.”

Stella flushed angrily.

“Well, what of that?” she demanded.  “His movements are nothing to me.”

“I don’t know,” Linda rejoined.  She had taken off her gloves and was rolling them nervously in a ball.  Now she dropped them and impulsively grasped Stella’s hands.

“Stella, Stella,” she cried.  “Don’t get that hurt, angry look.  I don’t like to say these things to you, but I feel that I have to.  I’m worried, and I’m afraid for you and your husband, for Charlie and myself, for all of us together.  Walter Monohan is as dangerous as any man who’s unscrupulous and rich and absolutely self-centered can possibly be.  I know the glamour of the man.  I used to feel it myself.  It didn’t go very far with me, because his attention wandered away from me before my feelings were much involved, and I had a chance to really fathom them and him.  He has a queer gift of making women care for him, and he trades on it deliberately.  He doesn’t play fair; he doesn’t mean to.  Oh, I know so many cruel things, despicable things, he’s done.  Don’t look at me like that, Stella.  I’m not saying this just to wound you.  I’m simply putting you on your guard.  You can’t play with fire and not get burned.  If you’ve been nursing any feeling for Walter Monohan, crush it, cut it out, just as you’d have a surgeon cut out a cancer.  Entirely apart from any question of Jack Fyfe, don’t let this man play any part whatever in your life.  You’ll be sorry if you do.  There’s not a man or woman whose relations with Monohan have been intimate enough to enable them to really know the man and his motives who doesn’t either hate or fear or despise him, and sometimes all three.”

“That’s a sweeping indictment,” Stella said stiffly.  “And you’re very earnest.  Yet I can hardly take your word at its face value.  If he’s so impossible a person, how does it come that you and your people countenanced him socially?  Besides, it’s all rather unnecessary, Linda.  I’m not the least bit likely to do anything that will reflect on your prospective husband, which is what it simmers down to, isn’t it?  I’ve been pulled and hauled this way and that ever since I’ve been on the coast, simply because I was dependent on some one else—­first Charlie and then Jack—­for the bare necessities