"I wish you would do something next month, not as a favor to me particularly, but to ease things along for Charlie and Linda. They are genuinely in love with each other. I can see you turning up your little nose at that. I know you've held a rather biased opinion of your brother and his works since that unfortunate winter. But it doesn't do to be too self-righteous. Charlie, then, was very little different from any rather headlong, self-centered, red-blooded youngster. I'm afraid I'm expressing myself badly. What I mean is that while he was drifting then into a piggy muddle, he had the sense to take a brace before his lapses became vices. Partly because--I've flattered myself--I talked to him like a Dutch uncle, and partly because he's cast too much in the same clean-cut mold that you are, to let his natural pa.s.sions run clean away with him.

He'll always be more or less a profound egotist. But he'll be a good deal more of a man than you, perhaps, think.

"I never used to think much of these matters. I suppose my own failure at a thing in which I was c.o.c.ksure of success had made me a bit dubious about anybody I care for starting so serious an undertaking as marriage under any sort of handicap. I do like Charlie Benton and Linda Abbey. They are marrying in the face of her people's earnest attempt to break it up. The Abbeys are hopelessly conservative. Anything in the nature of our troubles aired in public would make it pretty tough sledding for Linda. As it stands, they are consenting very ungracefully, but as a matter of family pride, intend to give Linda a big wedding.

"Now, no one outside of you and me and--well you and me--knows that there is a rift in our lute. I haven't been quizzed--naturally. It got about that you'd taken up voice culture with an eye to opera as a counteracting influence to the grief of losing your baby. I fostered that rumor--simply to keep gossip down until things shaped themselves positively. Once these two are married, they have started--Abbey _pere_ and _mere_ will then be unable to frown on Linda's contemplated alliance with a family that's produced a divorce case.

"I do not suppose you will take any legal steps until after those concerts. Until then, please keep up the fiction that the house of Fyfe still stands on a solid foundation--a myth that you've taken no measures to dispel since you left. When it does come, it will be a sort of explosion, and I'd rather have it that way--one amazed yelp from our friends and the newspapers, and it's over.

"Meantime, you will receive an invitation to the wedding. I hope you'll accept. You needn't have any compunctions about playing the game. You will not encounter me, as I have my hands full here, and I'm notorious in Vancouver for backing out of functions, anyway. It is not imperative that you should do this. It's merely a safeguard against a bomb from the Abbey fortress.

"Linda is troubled by a belief that upon small pretext they would be very nasty, and she naturally doesn't want any friction with her folks. They have certain vague but highly material ambitions for her matrimonially, which she, a very sensible girl, doesn't subscribe to. She's a very shrewd and practical young person, for all her whole-hearted pa.s.sion for your brother. I rather think she pretty clearly guesses the breach in our rampart--not the original mistake in our over-hasty plunge--but the wedge that divided us for good. If she does, and I'm quite sure she does, she is certainly good stuff, because she is most loyally your champion. I say that because Charlie had a tendency this spring to carp at your desertion of Roaring Lake. Things aren't going any too good with us, one way and another, and of course he, not knowing the real reason of your absence, couldn't understand why you stay away. I had to squelch him, and Linda abetted me successfully. However, that's beside the point. I hope I haven't irritated you. I'm such a dumb sort of brute generally. I don't know what imp of prolixity got into my pen. I've got it all off my chest now, or pretty near.

"J.H.F."

Stella sat thoughtfully gazing at the letter for a long time.

"I wonder?" she said aloud, and the sound of her own voice galvanized her into action. She put on a coat and went out into the mellow spring sunshine, and walked till the aimless straying of her feet carried her to a little park that overlooked the far reach of the Sound and gave westward on the snowy Olympics, thrusting h.o.a.ry and aloof to a perfect sky, like their brother peaks that ringed Roaring Lake. And all the time her mind kept turning on a question whose asking was rooted neither in fact nor necessity, an inquiry born of a sentiment she had never expected to feel.

Should she go back to Jack Fyfe?

She shook her head impatiently when she faced that squarely. Why tread the same bitter road again? But she put that self-interested phase of it aside and asked herself candidly if she _could_ go back and take up the old threads where they had been broken off and make life run smoothly along the old, quiet channels? She was as sure as she was sure of the breath she drew that Fyfe wanted her, that he longed for and would welcome her. But she was equally sure that the old illusions would never serve. She couldn't even make him happy, much less herself.

Monohan--well, Monohan was a dead issue. He had come to the Charteris to see her, all smiles and eagerness. She had been able to look at him and through him--and cut him dead--and do it without a single flutter of her heart.

That brief and illuminating episode in Wain's had merely confirmed an impression that had slowly grown upon her, and her outburst of feeling that night had only been the overflowing of shamed anger at herself for letting his magnetic personality make so deep an impression on her that she could admit to him that she cared. She felt that she had belittled herself by that. But he was no longer a problem. She wondered now how he ever could have been. She recalled that once Jack Fyfe had soberly told her she would never sense life's real values while she nursed so many illusions. Monohan had been one of them.

"But it wouldn't work," she whispered to herself. "I couldn't do it.

He'd know I only did it because I was sorry, because I thought I should, because the old ties, and they seem so many and so strong in spite of everything, were harder to break than the new road is to follow alone.

He'd resent anything like pity for his loneliness. And if Monohan has made any real trouble, it began over me, or at least it focussed on me.

And he might resent that. He's ten times a better man than I am a woman.

He thinks about the other fellow's side of things. I'm just what he said about Charlie, self-centered, a profound egotist. If I really and truly loved Jack Fyfe, I'd be a jealous little fury if he so much as looked at another woman. But I don't, and I don't see why I don't. I want to be loved; I want to love. I've always wanted that so much that I'll never dare trust my instincts about it again. I wonder why people like me exist to go blundering about in the world, playing havoc with themselves and everybody else?"

Before she reached home, that self-sacrificing mood had vanished in the face of sundry twinges of pride. Jack Fyfe hadn't asked her to come back; he never would ask her to come back. Of that she was quite sure.

She knew the stony determination of him too well. Neither hope or heaven nor fear of h.e.l.l would turn him aside when he had made a decision. If he ever had moments of irresolution, he had successfully concealed any such weakness from those who knew him best. No one ever felt called upon to pity Jack Fyfe, and in those rocked-ribbed qualities, Stella had an illuminating flash, perhaps lay the secret of his failure ever to stir in her that yearning tenderness which she knew herself to be capable of lavishing, which her nature impelled her to lavish on some one.

"Ah, well," she sighed, when she came back to her rooms and put Fyfe's letter away in a drawer. "I'll do the decent thing if they ask me. I wonder what Jack would say if he knew what I've been debating with myself this afternoon? I wonder if we were actually divorced and I'd made myself a reputation as a singer, and we happened to meet quite casually sometime, somewhere, just how we'd really feel about each other?"

She was still musing on that, in a detached, impersonal fashion, when she caught a car down to the theater for the matinee.

CHAPTER XXI

AN UNEXPECTED MEETING

The formally worded wedding card arrived in due course. Following close came a letter from Linda Abbey, a missive that radiated friendliness and begged Stella to come a week before the date.

"You're going to be pretty prominent in the public eye when you sing here," Linda wrote. "People are going to make a to-do over you. Ever so many have mentioned you since the announcement was made that you'll sing at the Granada concerts. I'm getting a lot of reflected glory as the future sister-in-law of a rising singer. So you may as well come and get your hand into the social game in preparation for being fussed over in July."

In the same mail was a characteristic note from Charlie which ran:

"_Dear Sis:_

"As the Siwashes say, long time I see you no. I might have dropped a line before, but you know what a punk correspondent I am. They tell me you're becoming a real noise musically. How about it?

"Can't you break away from the fame and fortune stuff long enough to be on hand when Linda and I get married? I wasn't invited to your wedding, but I'd like to have you at mine. Jack says it's up to you to represent the Fyfe connection, as he's too busy. I'll come over to Seattle and get you, if you say so."

She capitulated at that and wrote saying that she would be there, and that she did not mind the trip alone in the least. She did not want Charlie asking pertinent questions about why she lived in such grubby quarters and practiced such strict economy in the matter of living.

Then there was the detail of arranging a break in her engagements, which ran continuously to the end of June. She managed that easily enough, for she was becoming too great a drawing card for managers to curtly override her wishes.

Almost before she realized it, June was at hand. Linda wrote again urgently, and Stella took the night boat for Vancouver a week before the wedding day. Linda met her at the dock with a machine. Mrs. Abbey was the essence of cordiality when she reached the big Abbey house on Vancouver's aristocratic "heights," where the local capitalists, all those fortunate climbers enriched by timber and mineral, grown wealthy in a decade through the great Coast boom, segregated themselves in "Villas" and "Places" and "Views," all painfully new and sometimes garish, striving for an effect in landscape and architecture which the very intensity of the striving defeated. They were well-meaning folk, however, the Abbeys included.

Stella could not deny that she enjoyed the luxury of the Abbey menage, the little festive round which was shaping about Linda in these last days of her spinsterhood. She relished the change from unremitting work. It amused her to startle little groups with the range and quality of her voice, when they asked her to sing. They made a much ado over that, a genuine admiration that flattered Stella. It was easy for her to fall into the swing of that life; it was only a lapsing back to the old ways.

But she saw it now with a more critical vision. It was soft and satisfying and eminently desirable to have everything one wanted without the effort of striving for it, but a begging wheedling game on the part of these women. They were, she told herself rather harshly, an incompetent, helpless lot, dependent one and all upon some man's favor or affection, just as she herself had been all her life until the past few months. Some man had to work and scheme to pay the bills. She did not know why this line of thought should arise, neither did she so far forget herself as to voice these social heresies. But it helped to reconcile her with her new-found independence, to put a less formidable aspect on the long, hard grind that lay ahead of her before she could revel in equal affluence gained by her own efforts. All that they had she desired,--homes, servants, clothes, social standing,--but she did not want these things bestowed upon her as a favor by some man, the emoluments of s.e.x.

She expected she would have to be on her guard with her brother, even to dissemble a little. But she found him too deeply engrossed in what to him was the most momentous event of his career, impatiently awaiting the day, rather dreading the publicity of it.

"Why in Sam Hill can't a man and a woman get married without all this fuss?" he complained once. "Why should we make our private affairs a spectacle for the whole town?"

"Princ.i.p.ally because mamma has her heart set on a spectacle," Linda laughed. "She'd hold up her hands in horror if she heard you. Decorated bridal bower, high church dignitary, bridesmaids, orange blossoms, rice, and all. Mamma likes to show off. Besides, that's the way it's done in society. _And_ the honeymoon."

They both giggled, as at some mirthful secret.

"Shall we tell her?" Linda nodded toward Stella.

"Sure," Benton said. "I thought you had."

"The happy couple will spend their honeymoon on a leisurely tour of the Southern and Eastern States, remaining for some weeks in Philadelphia, where the groom has wealthy and influential connections. It's all prepared for the pay-a-purs," Linda whispered with exaggerated secrecy behind her hand.

Benton snorted.

"Can you beat that?" he appealed to Stella.

"And all the time," Linda continued, "the happy couple, unknown to every one, will be spending their days in peace and quietness in their shanty at Halfway Point. My, but mamma would rave if she knew. Don't give us away, Stella. It seems so senseless to squander a lot of money gadding about on trains and living in hotels when we'd much rather be at home by ourselves. My husband's a poor young man, Stella. 'Pore but worthy.' He has to make his fortune before we start in spending it. I'm sick of all this spreading it on because dad has made a pile of money," she broke out impatiently. "Our living used to be simple enough when I was a kid.

I think I can relish a little simplicity again for a change. Mamma's been trying for four years to marry me off to her conception of an eligible man. It didn't matter a hang about his essential qualities so long as he had money and an a.s.sured social position."

"Forget that," Charlie counseled slangily. "I have all the essential qualities, and I'll have the money and social position too; you watch my smoke."

"Conceited ninny," Linda smiled. But there was no reproof in her tone, only pure comradeship and affection, which Benton returned so openly and unaffectedly that Stella got up and left them with a pang of envy, a dull little ache in her heart. She had missed that. It had pa.s.sed her by, that clean, spontaneous fusing of two personalities in the biggest pa.s.sion life holds. Marriage and motherhood she had known, not as the flowering of love, not as an eager fulfilling of her natural destiny, but as something extraneous, an avenue of escape from an irksomeness of living, a weariness with sordid things, which she knew now had obsessed her out of all proportion to their reality. She had never seen that tenderness glow in the eyes of a mating pair that she did not envy them, that she did not feel herself hopelessly defrauded of her woman's heritage.

She went up to her room, moody, full of bitterness, and walked the thick-carpeted floor, the restlessness of her chafing spirit seeking the outlet of action.

"Thank the Lord I've got something to do, something that's worth doing,"

she whispered savagely. "If I can't have what I want, I can make my life embrace something more than just food and clothes and social trifling.

If I had to sit and wait for each day to bring what it would, I believe I'd go clean mad."