All the way back to Mrs. Bean’s lodging-house he had dwelt upon Helen’s loveliness, longed, as he didn’t suppose he could ever long again, for an hour with her. A wave of despair had swept over him. Helen Dane was miles away, barriered and forbidden now.

Stephen had fallen asleep in his bare, bleak bedroom very miserable and unhappy. But in reality his state of mind was healthier, more normal than it had been since his father had died, and that night Stephen’s youth danced a little delighted jig of triumph on the dingy pillow-case beside him as he slept.

4

STELLA MARTIN WAS an acknowledged belle in Cataract village. Her lips were cherry-red, her cheeks peach-blossom pink, and without paint and powder in those days. She had, too, as her girl friends expressed it, “stacks of style.” Stella Martin could drape a straight piece of cloth about her hips and shoulders, and it would assume fashionable lines all by itself! She far out-shone the other young girls in Cataract Village. She was far better educated than the other girls. Stella had gone all the way through the high school, and graduated in a white dress with ruffles. When Stephen met Stella she was completing a course at the State Normal School on the other side of the river.

Not that Stella meant to make teaching a life-work! By no means! But it happened that next to the State Normal School there was located a technical school for young men. Stella had heard that students at the two institutions of learning sometimes made friendships that led to an interchange of ceremonies that sounded attractive to her.

Stella was ambitious. She couldn’t help but see she was different from the girl friends of her childhood. Most of them were content to take a job in the weaving-rooms at the mills, as soon as they had finished the ninth grade, or a year or two in the high school; or else to marry some raw, half-awake young man, from the mills, and live in one of the Cataract Village three-deckers, and have children, and children, and children! Not Stella, however! Nothing like that for Stella Martin!

There was a little brown spot on Stella’s neck. It showed when she wore summer dresses cut in a low V in front. She was on the point of having it removed when a certain old woman, a sort of half-witch, told her it was a sign that some day she would make a brilliant marriage. So Stella kept her little brown spot, and though she laughed and flirted with almost every young man who admired her, and generously let them hold her hand, and take advantage of the dark, she had no notion of marrying in a hurry.