She heard him in the hall, his deep voice mingling with the thin, penetrating tones of Mrs. Abbey.  And then the library door opened, and he came in.  Stella had risen, and stood uncertainly at one corner of a big reading table, repressing an impulse to fly, finding herself stricken with a strange recurrence of the feeling she had first disliked him for arousing in her,—­a sense of needing to be on her guard, of impending assertion of a will infinitely more powerful than her own.

But that was, she told herself, only a state of mind, and Fyfe put her quickly at her ease.  He came up to the table and seated himself on the edge of it an arm’s length from her, swinging one foot free.  He looked at her intently.  There was no shadow of expression on his face, only in his clear eyes lurked a gleam of feeling.

“Well, lady,” he said at length, “you’re looking fine.  How goes everything?”

“Fairly well,” she answered.

“Seems odd, doesn’t it, to meet like this?” he ventured.  “I’d have dodged it, if it had been politic.  As it is, there’s no harm done, I imagine.  Mrs. Abbey assured me we’d be free from interruption.  If the exceedingly cordial dame had an inkling of how things stand between us, I daresay she’d be holding her breath about now.”

“Why do you talk like that, Jack?” Stella protested nervously.

“Well, I have to say something,” he remarked, after a moment’s reflection.  “I can’t sit here and just look at you.  That would be rude, not to say embarrassing.”

Stella bit her lip.

“I don’t see why we can’t talk like any other man and woman for a few minutes,” she observed.

“I do,” he said quietly.  “You know why, too, if you stop to think.  I’m the same old Jack Fyfe, Stella.  I don’t think much where you are concerned; I just feel.  And that doesn’t lend itself readily to impersonal chatter.”

“How do you feel?” she asked, meeting his gaze squarely.  “If you don’t hate me, you must at least rather despise me.”

“Neither,” he said slowly.  “I admire your grit, lady.  You broke away from everything and made a fresh start.  You asserted your own individuality in a fashion that rather surprised me.  Maybe the incentive wasn’t what it might have been, but the result is, or promises to be.  I was only a milestone.  Why should I hate or despise you because you recognized that and passed on?  I had no business setting myself up for the end of your road instead of the beginning.  I meant to have it that way until the kid—­well, Fate took a hand there.  Pshaw,” he broke off with a quick gesture, “let’s talk about something else.”

Stella laid one hand on his knee.  Unbidden tears were crowding up in her gray eyes.

“You were good to me,” she whispered.  “But just being good wasn’t enough for a perverse creature like me.  I couldn’t be a sleek pussy-cat, comfortable beside your fire.  I’m full of queer longings.  I want wings.  I must be a variation from the normal type of woman.  Our marriage didn’t touch the real me at all, Jack.  It only scratched the surface.  And sometimes I’m afraid to look deep, for fear of what I’ll see.  Even if another man hadn’t come along and stirred up a temporary tumult in me, I couldn’t have gone on forever.”