Tremblingly, anxiously, she groped her way across the hall to her desk in the front room. If only she could find the address. It was on a card. She had never thrown the card away. It must be somewhere. Oh, what if Laurel in one of her raids upon the cluttered desk had torn it up, tossed it aside? What if it was ashes now? She had no other clue. If the card was lost, she was lost. “Help me find it. Help me find it.” It was about the size of a calling-card, a little larger, very grimy, because she had carried it about in her shopping-bag for a long while. Here! This looked like it! Yes, this was it! No, it wasn’t! Yes, it was. Yes! Yes! She had found it. She held it up close to the electric light.

ALFRED MUNN,

172 NORTH BLANK STREET,

BOSTON, MASS.

She’d go to bed now. She’d go to sleep. “Thanks, oh, thanks,” she said on her knees three minutes later. “Do please help me bring this business out all right.”

Stella as well as Laurel was sleeping soundly and sweetly at dawn on the second morning.

Chapter 22

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

1

STELLA SET FORTH in quest of 172 North Blank Street the next afternoon. She might have written, of course. If it had been a matter of less importance she would have written. When Ed had given her this address he had meant that she should write.

“Uncle Sam will find me here,” he had told her. “Drop me a line sometime when the offspring’s away and you’re feeling lonesome.”

That was over a year ago, when she had chanced to run across Ed one afternoon in the lobby of a moving-picture theater. She hadn’t seen him since. She hadn’t heard from him since. He might feel entirely different about her now. A year was an awfully long time. Perhaps he wouldn’t want to marry her now. Perhaps he’d never really wanted to marry her. He had always laughed when he had suggested it, and she had always laughed back when she had refused his crazy offers. For years it had been sort of a huge joke on both sides. She guessed Ed would be surprised to be taken seriously all of a sudden. She did hope he hadn’t married anyone else. Not that she could imagine such a thing. Ed wasn’t a bit the marrying kind, but just hoping so hard made her think of all sorts of catastrophes. Perhaps he’d moved away from Boston entirely. Perhaps he was dead, or perhaps—what if she wasn’t attractive to him any more? She was a whole year older, and a whole year after you’re forty—well!