“What’s ‘S’ stand for, Mr. Dallas?” Stella had asked with the time-worn coyness of her sex when first touching upon so intimate a subject as first names.

“Stephen,” Stephen had replied shortly, from the Gloucester hammock.

“Stephen, Stephen,” Stella had repeated two or three times—in a dainty, sort of experimental fashion, as if she were tasting some new kind of candy. “Stephen.” Then, “It’s nice. I like it,” she exclaimed and glanced up at Stephen from under her long lashes.

“Really? Do you?” Stephen had laughed, just a little disconcerted.

Stella liked the way he said “Really?” and “Do you?” and later, “Delightful,” and “Int’resting.” He spoke like an actor on the stage, she thought.

When Stella discovered that her caller was a college graduate, and a college graduate from the same university which Harold Miller and Spencer Chisholm had attended, as well as a half-dozen other young Milhampton blue-bloods, who lived on the other side of the river, and whom Stella knew by sight and reputation, and by their fine houses on upper Webster Street, she was aware that this Mr. Dallas was the biggest opportunity she had ever had.

You might have thought she would have been a little awed, but Stella had confidence in her personal charms. Experience had convinced her that the same upward glances, intimacies, reservations, shynesses, boldnesses, what-not, were attractive to the genus “young man” whatever his species. When Stephen Dallas bade Stella good-bye that first night, he had held her willing hand a moment longer than is conventional and had asked if he could come again.

Later, when Stella went to bed, she tipped the little high square mirror on her bureau well forward and, gazing up into it, at her bare, fair expanse of gleaming neck and shoulders, she placed her forefinger on the little brown beauty-spot and pressed it gently.

“I wonder,” she whispered.

6

THE DISTANCE BETWEEN Mrs. Bean’s lodging-house and the little red cottage was only a quarter of a mile. It took Stephen less than ten minutes to walk it. Mrs. Bean’s boarding-house was an impossible place in which to spend the evening. The walks around and about the boarding-house had come to seem impossible, too. So also had the bare, white-lighted, white-walled reading-room at the Milhampton Public Library.

Ever since Stephen had come to Milhampton (up to the time he met Stella), each night, when he finished his supper in the boarding-house dining-room, he was faced with the problem of killing two and a half hours somehow till a civilized hour for sleep arrived. But after he met Stella, and found the straight, easy way that led to the red cottage, there was no problem as to how to spend his evenings—at least as to how he wanted to spend them.