“Why?” asked Joan.

“I should have thrown myself out of the carriage and saved myself—­oh, so much sorrow afterwards,” Stella Croyle answered in so simple and natural a voice that Joan could not disbelieve her.

Joan clasped her hands before her eyes and then gazed again at Stella sitting in front of her, with pity and wonder.  It was so hard for her to understand that this pretty woman, who made it her business to be gay, whom she had met from time to time in this house and had chatted with and forgotten, had passed through so dreadful an ordeal of suffering and humiliation.  She was to look closer still into the mysteries which were being revealed to her.

Harry Luttrell had held Stella in his arms just as if she had been a child herself whilst the train rushed through the bleak winter country.  Stella had behaved like a child, now sobbing in a passion of grief, now mutinous in a passion of rage, now silent and despairing under the weights that nothing, neither sympathy, nor grief, nor revolt, can lift.

“He took me home.  He stayed with me.  Oh, it wasn’t love,” cried Stella.  “He was afraid.”

“Afraid!” asked Joan.  She wished to know every least detail of the story now.

“Afraid lest I should take—­something ... as I wished to do ... as during the trouble of the divorce I learned to do.”

She related little ridiculous incidents which Joan listened to with a breaking heart.  Stella could not sleep at all after her return.  She lived in a little house with a big garden on the northern edge of London, and all night she lay awake, listening to the patter of rain on melancholy trees, and thinking and thinking.  Harry Luttrell kept her from the drugs in her dressing-case.  She had no anodyne for her sorrows—­but one.

“You will laugh,” said Stella with a little wry smile of her own, “when I tell you what it was.  It was a gramophone.  I got Harry to set it going, whilst I lay in bed—­to set it playing rag-time.  While it was playing, I stopped thinking.  For I had to keep time in my brain with the beat of the tune.  And so, at last, since I couldn’t think, or remember, I fell asleep.  The gramophone saved me”; and again Joan was smitten by the incongruity of Stella with her life.  She had eaten of all that nature allots to women—­love, marriage, the birth of children, the loss of them—­and there she was, to this day half-child, and quite incompatible with what she had suffered and endured.

“After a fortnight I got quieter of course,” said Stella.  “And suddenly a change sadder than anything I have told you took place in me.  I suppose that I had gone through too much on baby’s account for me.  I lost something more than my baby, I lost my want to have her with me.”

She remained silent for a little while reviewing the story which she had told.