Stella had not minced matters with herself when she left Roaring Lake.  Dazed and shaken by suffering, nevertheless she knew that she would not always suffer, that in time she would get back to that normal state in which the human ego diligently pursues happiness.  In time the legal tie between herself and Jack Fyfe would cease to exist.  If Monohan cared for her as she thought he cared, a year or two more or less mattered little.  They had all their lives before them.  In the long run, the errors and mistakes of that upheaval would grow dim, be as nothing.  Jack Fyfe would shrug his shoulders and forget, and in due time he would find a fitter mate, one as loyal as he deserved.  And why might not she, who had never loved him, whose marriage to him had been only a climbing out of the fire into the frying-pan?

So that with all her determination to make the most of her gift of song, so that she would never again be buffeted by material urgencies in a material world, Stella had nevertheless been listening with the ear of her mind, so to speak, for a word from Monohan to say that he understood, and that all was well.

Paradoxically, she had not expected to hear that word.  Once in Seattle, away from it all, there slowly grew upon her the conviction that in Monohan’s fine avowal and renunciation he had only followed the cue she had given.  In all else he had played his own hand.  She couldn’t forget Billy Dale.  If the motive behind that bloody culmination were thwarted love, it was a thing to shrink from.  It seemed to her now, forcing herself to reason with cold-blooded logic, that Monohan desired her less than he hated Fyfe’s possession of her; that she was merely an added factor in the breaking out of a struggle for mastery between two diverse and dominant men.  Every sign and token went to show that the pot of hate had long been simmering.  She had only contributed to its boiling over.

“Oh, well,” she sighed, “it’s out of my hands altogether now.  I’m sorry, but being sorry doesn’t make any difference.  I’m the least factor, it seems, in the whole muddle.  A woman isn’t much more than an incident in a man’s life, after all.”

She dressed to go to the Charteris, for her day’s work was about to begin.  As so often happens in life’s uneasy flow, periods of calm are succeeded by events in close sequence.  Howard and his wife insisted that Stella join them at supper after the show.  They were decent folk who accorded frank admiration to her voice and her personality.  They had been kind to her in many little ways, and she was glad to accept.

At eleven a taxi deposited them at the door of Wain’s.  The Seattle of yesterday needs no introduction to Wain’s, and its counterpart can be found in any cosmopolitan, seaport city.  It is a place of subtle distinction, tucked away on one of the lower hill streets, where after-theater parties and nighthawks with an eye for pretty women, an ear for sensuous music, and a taste for good food, go when they have money to spend.