“You mean you decided it. I never did. Mercy, I’ve got to have a little independence. With you away so much every day, Laurel, and nothing for me to do, I’d be a very foolish woman indeed, to allow a notion of yours to cheat me out of a little harmless entertainment.”

Thus did Stella proceed. She mustn’t marry Ed immediately, out of a clear sky, on top of the discussion with Laurel following her return from New York. Laurel might smell a rat. There must be no blundering this time. Ed must be slipped onto the field of action naturally, inadvertently. Funny how things worked around. That which Ed had been years ago between herself and her husband, through carelessness and indifference, now, today, through diligence and effort, she must make him become again, between herself and her child—an issue, a sore point, a bone of contention. Not until then would the time be ripe to marry Ed. Steadily, unswervingly, Stella set herself to her task.

It was easier than she had supposed. Laurel’s hostility to Ed was so white-hot that even a reference to him kindled a controversy. Therefore Stella referred to him frequently in a light and inconsequential vein, laughing at Laurel’s opposition. Not only did she refer to Ed, but she saw him; she made engagements with him; she kept engagements with him; she stayed out with him until after one o’clock on one occasion; failed to appear for supper, or to telephone, on another. One afternoon, defiantly, she established Ed in an armchair in the living-room of the apartment, and arranged that Laurel, due home from downtown, should find him when she came in. She repeated this a week later. Oh, it was too bad. She hated to watch the slow torture her procedure was to the child. But it couldn’t be avoided. Somehow she must make her marriage to Ed seem logical.

Laurel’s light laughter faded, disappeared; the soft light in her eyes hardened like a disillusioned lover’s. Night after night she lay, on the extreme edge of the bed, beside her mother, silent and unrelenting, and drifted into an unrefreshing sleep. She grew years older.

One afternoon in early June, after a particularly difficult morning of argument with her mother about Alfred Munn (afterward Stella had called good-bye to Lollie out of the front window, but she wouldn’t answer), she returned to the apartment to find it empty. There was a note fastened to the handle of the oven-door on the gas-stove in the kitchen. Laurel discovered it when she went out to get some supper.

DEAR LOLLIE,