WHEN ALFRED MUNN returned from Florida with his horses for another season at the River Club, he put many of Stella’s ghosts into flight. He filled her engagement calendar; he provided climaxes to her days; he saw to it that there was never a week when Stella didn’t dress up in her best clothes and set out for “a real little party” of some sort somewhere. He broke the back of the worst goblin of all—her fear (her almost conviction now) that when a woman’s husband goes out of town for any length of time and people begin to wonder why, all her old admirers turn tail and run, too, to avoid any possible danger of being mentioned in a scandal. Life wouldn’t be worth living, Stella felt, if she had no admirers.

Riding was still popular in Milhampton that spring; Alfred Munn was still popular. Stella grasped at his attentions eagerly, instinctively, as she would at a rope flung to her from the basket of a balloon that offered to rescue her from some unfortunate fate and carry her aloft. But the balloon of Alfred Munn’s popularity in Milhampton had already begun to lose its buoyancy. It couldn’t carry Stella far. Alfred Munn should have been throwing off ballast instead of taking on more. For a while, though, it lifted Stella out of the valley, and diverted her attention from its shadows. Under the excitement of Alfred Munn’s attentions, Stella took heart.