“I didn’t take her,” replied Stella Croyle.  “I wouldn’t take her.  I knew baby—­besides she had struck me too hard.”

“You came away alone!” whispered Joan.

“In the cab which I had kept waiting at the door to take us both away.”

“That’s terrible!” said Joan.  The child with her lovely face set like flint in the room, the mother creeping out of the house and stumbling alone into the fly at the door—­the picture was vivid before her eyes.  Joan wrung her hands with a little helpless gesture, and a moan upon her lips.  Almost it seemed that these sad things were actually happening to her; so poignantly she felt them.

“Oh, and you had all that long journey back to London, the journey you had dreamt of for eleven months with your baby at your side—­you had now to take it alone.”

Stella Croyle shook her head.

“No!  There was just one and only one of my friends—­and not at all a great friend—­who had the imagination to understand, as you understand too, Joan, just what that journey would have meant to me, if anything had gone wrong, and the kindness to put himself out to make its endurance a little easier.”

Joan drew back quickly.

“Harry Luttrell,” she whispered.

“Yes.  He had once been stationed at Exeter.  He knew Robert Croyle and the sisters.  He guessed what might happen to me.  Perhaps he knew that it was going to happen.”

So, when Stella, having pulled down her veil that none might see her face, was stumbling along the platform in search of an empty carriage, a hand was very gently laid upon her and Harry Luttrell was at her side.  He had come all the way from London to befriend her, should she need it.  If he had seen her with her little girl, he would have kept out of sight and himself have returned to London by a later train.

“That was fine,” cried Joan.

“Fine, yes!” answered Stella.  “You realise that, Joan, and you have never been in real trouble, or known what men are when kindness interferes with their comfort.  I am not blaming people, but women do get the worst of it, if they are fools enough—­wicked enough if you like, to do as I did.  I knew men—­lots of them.  I was bound to.  I was fair game, you see.”

Joan’s forehead wrinkled.  The doors of knowledge had been opening very rapidly for her during the last few minutes.  But she was still often at a loss.

“Fair game.  Why?  I don’t understand.”

“I had been divorced.  Therefore I wasn’t dangerous.  Complications couldn’t follow from a little affair with me.”  Stella explained bitterly.  “I had men on my doorstep always.  But not one of these men who protested and made love to me, would have put themselves out to do what Harry Luttrell did.  It was fine—­yes.  But for three years I have been wondering whether Harry Luttrell would not really have been kinder if he had thought of his own comfort too, and had never travelled to Exeter to befriend me.”