It was not a difficult selection, merely a bit from a current light opera, with a closing passage that ranged a trifle too high for the ordinary untrained voice to take with ease.  Stella sang it effortlessly, the last high, trilling notes pouring out as sweet and clear as the carol of a lark.  Benton struck the closing chord and looked up at her.  Fyfe leaned forward in his chair.  Jack Junior, among his pillows on the floor, waved his arms, kicking and gurgling.

“You did pretty well on that,” Charlie remarked complacently.  “Now sing something.  Got any of your old pieces?”

“I wonder if I could?” Stella murmured.  “I’m almost afraid to try.”

She hurried away to some outlying part of the house, reappearing in a few minutes with a dog-eared bundle of sheets in her hand.  From among these she selected three and set them on the rack.

Benton whistled when he glanced over the music.

“The Siren Song,” he grunted.  “What is it? something new?  Lord, look at the scale.  Looks like one of those screaming arias from the ’Flying Dutchman.’  Some stunt.”

“Marchand composed it for the express purpose of trying out voices,” Stella said.  “It is a stunt.”

“You’ll have to play your own accompaniment,” Charlie grinned.  “That’s too much for me.”

“Oh, just so you give me a little support here and there,” Stella told him.  “I can’t sing sitting on a piano stool.”

Benton made a face at the music and struck the keys.

It seemed to Stella nothing short of a miracle.  She had been mute so long.  She had almost forgotten what a tragedy losing her voice had been.  And to find it again, to hear it ring like a trumpet.  It did!  It was too big for the room.  She felt herself caught up in a triumphant ecstasy as she sang.  She found herself blinking as the last note died away.  Her brother twisted about on the piano stool, fumbling for a cigarette.

“And still they say they can’t come back,” he remarked at last.  “Why, you’re better than you ever were, Stella.  You’ve got the old sweetness and flexibility that dad used to rave about.  But your voice is bigger, somehow different.  It gets under a man’s skin.”

She picked up the baby from the floor, began to play with him.  She didn’t want to talk.  She wanted to think, to gloat over and hug to herself this miracle of her restored voice.  She was very quiet, very much absorbed in her own reflections until it was time—­very shortly—­to put Jack Junior in his bed.  That was a function she made wholly her own.  The nurse might greet his waking whimper in the morning and minister to his wants throughout the day, but Stella “tucked him in” his crib every night.  And after the blue eyes were closed, she sat there, very still, thinking.  In a detached way she was conscious of hearing Charlie leave.

Later, when she was sitting beside her dressing table brushing her hair, Fyfe came in.  He perched himself on the foot rail of the bed, looking silently at her.  She had long grown used to that.  It was a familiar trick of his.