Joan answered quietly and quite distinctly: 

“I wish he were dead!”

Stella Croyle fell back upon her first declaration.

“You must leave my Wub alone.”

Joan laughed aloud, harshly and without any merriment.  She checked herself with an effort lest she should go on laughing, and her laughter turn uncontrollably into hysteria and tears.  Here was Mrs. Croyle, a grown woman, standing in front of her like a mutinous obstinate child, looking like one too, talking like one and bidding Joan leave her Wub alone.  Whence did she get that ridiculous name?  It was all degrading and grotesque.

“Your Wub!  Your Wub!” she cried in a heat.  “Yes, I am only twenty, and probably I am quite wrong and stupid.  But it seems to me horrible that we two women should be wrangling over a man neither of us had met a week ago.  I’ll have no more of it.”

She flung towards the window, but Stella Croyle cried out, “A week ago!” and the cry brought her to a stop.  Joan turned and looked doubtfully at Mrs. Croyle.  After all, that ridiculous label had not been pasted on to Harry Luttrell as a result of a week’s acquaintance.  Harry Luttrell had certainly talked to Stella through the greater part of an evening, his first evening in the house, but they had hardly been together at all since then.  Joan came back slowly into the room.

“So you knew Colonel Luttrell before this week?”

“We were great friends a few years ago.”

It was disturbing to Joan that Harry Luttrell had never spoken to her of this friendship.  Was it possible that Stella had a claim upon him of which she herself knew nothing?  She sat down at a table in front of Mrs. Croyle.

“Tell me,” she said.

Once, long ago, upon the deck of the Dragonfly at Stockholm, Stella had cried out to Harry Luttrell, “Oh, what a cruel mistake you made when you went out of your way to be kind!” Joan was now to hear how that cry had come to be uttered by a woman in the nethermost distress.  She knew, of course, that Stella was married at the age of seventeen and had been divorced, but little more than that.

“There was a little girl,” said Stella, “my baby.  I lost her.”

She spoke very simply.  She had come to the end of efforts and schemes, and was very tired.  Joan’s anger died away altogether in her heart.

“Oh, I am very sorry,” she replied.  “I didn’t know that you had a little girl.”

“Yes.  Look, here is her portrait.”  Stella Croyle drew out from her bosom a locket which hung night and day against her heart, and showed it to Joan across the table.  “But I don’t know whether she is little any more.  She is thirteen now.”

Joan gazed at the painted miniature of a lovely child with the eyes and the hair of Stella Croyle.

“And you lost her altogether?” she asked with a rising pity.

“Not at first,” answered Stella.  “I was allowed by the Court to have her with me for one month in every year.  And I lived the other eleven months for the one, the wonderful one.”