* * * * *

When the elm before her window broke into leaf, and the sodden winter skies were transformed into a warm spring vista of blue, Stella was singing a special engagement in a local vaudeville house that boasted a “big time” bill.  She had stepped up.  The silvery richness of her voice had carried her name already beyond local boundaries, as the singing master under whom she studied prophesied it would.  In proof thereof she received during April a feminine committee of two from Vancouver bearing an offer of three hundred dollars for her appearance in a series of three concerts under the auspices of the Woman’s Musical Club, to be given in the ballroom of Vancouver’s new million-dollar hostelry, the Granada.  The date was mid-July.  She took the offer under advisement, promising a decision in ten days.

The money tempted her; that was her greatest need now,—­not for her daily bread, but for an accumulated fund that would enable her to reach New York and ultimately Europe, if that seemed the most direct route to her goal.  She had no doubts about reaching it now.  Confidence came to abide with her.  She throve on work; and with increasing salary, her fund grew.  Coming from any other source, she would have accepted this further augmentation of it without hesitation, since for a comparative beginner, it was a liberal offer.

But Vancouver was Fyfe’s home town; it had been hers.  Many people knew her; the local papers would feature her.  She did not know how Fyfe would take it; she did not even know if there had been any open talk of their separation.  Money, she felt, was a small thing beside opening old sores.  For herself, she was tolerably indifferent to Vancouver’s social estimate of her or her acts.  Nevertheless, so long as she bore Fyfe’s name, she did not feel free to make herself a public figure there without his sanction.  So she wrote to him in some detail concerning the offer and asked point-blank if it mattered to him.

His answer came with uncanny promptness, as if every mail connection had been made on the minute.

“If it is to your advantage to sing here,” he wrote, “by all means accept.  Why should it matter to me?  I would even be glad to come and hear you sing if I could do so without stirring up vain longings and useless regrets.  As for the other considerations you mention, they are of no weight at all.  I never wanted to keep you in a glass case.  Even if all were well between us, I wouldn’t have any feeling about your singing in public other than pride in your ability to command public favor with your voice.  It’s a wonderful voice, too big and fine a thing to remain obscure.

    “JACK.”

He added, evidently as an afterthought, a somewhat lengthy postscript: