Through that same window she had watched
Jack Fyfe walk out of her life three months ago without a backward look,
sturdily, silently, uncomplaining. He hadn't whined, he wasn't whining
now,--only flinging a cheerful word out of the blank spaces of his own
life into the blank spaces of hers. Stella felt something warm and wet
steal down her cheeks.
She crumpled the letter with a sudden, spasmodic clenching of her hand.
A lump rose chokingly in her throat. She stabbed at the light switch and
threw herself on the bed, sobbing her heart's cry in the dusky quiet.
And she could not have told why, except that she had been overcome by a
miserably forlorn feeling; all the mental props she relied upon were
knocked out from under her. Somehow those few scrawled words had flung
swiftly before her, like a picture on a screen, a vision of her baby
toddling uncertainly across the porch of the white bungalow. And she
could not bear to think of that!
* * * * *
When the elm before her window broke into leaf, and the sodden winter
skies were transformed into a warm spring vista of blue, Stella was
singing a special engagement in a local vaudeville house that boasted a
"big time" bill. She had stepped up. The silvery richness of her voice
had carried her name already beyond local boundaries, as the singing
master under whom she studied prophesied it would. In proof thereof she
received during April a feminine committee of two from Vancouver bearing
an offer of three hundred dollars for her appearance in a series of
three concerts under the auspices of the Woman's Musical Club, to be
given in the ballroom of Vancouver's new million-dollar hostelry, the
Granada.
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