“A temporary tumult,” Fyfe mused.  “Have you thoroughly chucked that illusion?  I knew you would, of course, but I had no idea how long it would take you.”

“Long ago,” she answered.  “Even before I left you, I was shaky about that.  There were things I couldn’t reconcile.  But pride wouldn’t let me admit it.  I can’t even explain it to myself.”

“I can,” he said, a little sadly.  “You’ve never poured out that big, warm heart of yours on a man.  It’s there, always has been there, those concentrated essences of passion.  Every unattached man’s a possible factor, a potential lover.  Nature has her own devices to gain her end.  I couldn’t be the one.  We started wrong.  I saw the mistake of that when it was too late.  Monohan, a highly magnetic animal, came along at a time when you were peculiarly and rather blindly receptive.  That’s all.  Sex—­you have it in a word.  It couldn’t stand any stress, that sort of attraction.  I knew it would only last until you got one illuminating glimpse of the real man of him.  But I don’t want to talk about him.  He’ll keep.  Sometime you’ll really love a man, Stella, and he’ll be a very lucky mortal.  There’s an erratic streak in you, lady, but there’s a bigger streak that’s fine and good and true.  You’d have gone through with it to the bitter end, if Jack Junior hadn’t died.  The weaklings don’t do that.  Neither do they cut loose as you did, burning all their economic bridges behind them.  Do you know that it was over a month before I found out that you’d turned your private balance back into my account?  I suppose there was a keen personal satisfaction in going on your own and making good from the start.  Only I couldn’t rest until—­until—­”

His voice trailed huskily off into silence.  The gloves in his left hand were doubled and twisted in his uneasy fingers.  Stella’s eyes were blurred.

“Well, I’m going,” he said shortly.  “Be good.”

He slipped off the table and stood erect, a wide, deep-chested man, tanned brown, his fair hair with its bronze tinge lying back in a smooth wave from his forehead, blue eyes bent on her, hot with a slumbering fire.

Without warning, he caught her close in his arms so that she could feel the pounding of his heart against her breast, kissed her cheeks, her hair, the round, firm white neck of her, with lips that burned.  Then he held her off at arm’s length.

“That’s how I care,” he said defiantly.  “That’s how I want you.  No other way.  I’m a one-woman man.  Some time you may love like that, and if you do, you’ll know how I feel.  I’ve watched you sleeping beside me and ached because I couldn’t kindle the faintest glow of the real thing in you.  I’m sick with a miserable sense of failure, the only thing I’ve ever failed at, and the biggest, most complete failure I can conceive of,—­to love a woman in every way desirable; to have her and yet never have her.”

He caught up his hat, and the door clicked shut behind him.  A minute later Stella saw him step into the tonneau of the car.  He never looked back.