ies 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.

"There, that's all," she said, rising suddenly. "It's no claim at all,
of course. I know that very well. Harry left me at Stockholm four years
ago;" and suddenly Joan's face flushed scarlet. She had been absorbed in
Stella's sorrows, she had admired that kind action of Harry Luttrell's
which had brough