Ensconced behind a potted palm, with a waiter taking Howard’s order, Stella let her gaze travel over the diners.  She brought up with a repressed start at a table but four removes from her own, her eyes resting upon the unmistakable profile of Walter Monohan.  He was dining vis-a-vis with a young woman chiefly remarkable for a profusion of yellow hair and a blazing diamond in the lobe of each ear,—­a plump, blond, vivacious person of a type that Stella, even with her limited experience, found herself instantly classifying.

A bottle of wine rested in an iced dish between them.  Monohan was toying with the stem of a half-emptied glass, smiling at his companion.  The girl leaned toward him, speaking rapidly, pouting.  Monohan nodded, drained his glass, signaled a waiter.  When she got into an elaborate opera cloak and Monohan into his Inverness, they went out, the plump, jeweled hand resting familiarly on Monohan’s arm.  Stella breathed a sigh of relief as they passed, looking straight ahead.  She watched through the upper half of the cafe window and saw a machine draw against the curb, saw the be-scarfed yellow head enter and Monohan’s silk hat follow.  Then she relaxed, but she had little appetite for her food.  A hot wave of shamed disgust kept coming over her.  She felt sick, physically revolted.  Very likely Monohan had put her in that class, in his secret thought.  She was glad when the evening ended, and the Howards left her at her own doorstep.

On the carpet where it had been thrust by the postman under the door, a white square caught her eye, and she picked it up before she switched on the light.  And she got a queer little shock when the light fell on the envelope, for it was addressed in Jack Fyfe’s angular handwriting.

She tore it open.  It was little enough in the way of a letter, a couple of lines scrawled across a sheet of note-paper.

    “Dear Girl:

    “I was in Seattle a few days ago and heard you sing.  Here’s hoping
    good luck rides with you.

    “JACK.”

Stella sat down by the window.  Outside, the ever-present Puget Sound rain drove against wall and roof and sidewalk, gathered in wet, glistening pools in the street.  Through that same window she had watched Jack Fyfe walk out of her life three months ago without a backward look, sturdily, silently, uncomplaining.  He hadn’t whined, he wasn’t whining now,—­only flinging a cheerful word out of the blank spaces of his own life into the blank spaces of hers.  Stella felt something warm and wet steal down her cheeks.

She crumpled the letter with a sudden, spasmodic clenching of her hand.  A lump rose chokingly in her throat.  She stabbed at the light switch and threw herself on the bed, sobbing her heart’s cry in the dusky quiet.  And she could not have told why, except that she had been overcome by a miserably forlorn feeling; all the mental props she relied upon were knocked out from under her.  Somehow those few scrawled words had flung swiftly before her, like a picture on a screen, a vision of her baby toddling uncertainly across the porch of the white bungalow.  And she could not bear to think of that!