“Sure you would! Well, I’ve no intention of kidnapping her.”

You see, as Stella told Effie McDavitt afterward, she and Ed had a perfect understanding.

3

WHEN STELLA PAID her bill of indebtedness to the proprietor of the boarding-house at Belcher’s Beach, for allowing her to economize for a month on his property, it was with a feeling of triumph and with the comforting sense of a disagreeable job well done. There were those, however, who regarded Stella’s sojourn in a different light. Stella was blissfully unaware that anyone except Effie and Ed even knew of the sojourn, anyone who had any connection with Milhampton.

As the train sped along toward that city, at the end of her ordeal, she was happy with the simple joy of release. She smiled and her heart sang, automatically almost, a little as a kitten purrs when it comes out of the rain and sees the warm fire on the hearth. She had no premonition of the nest of bombs lying in her letter-box among the other letters and communications that had arrived too near the date of her return to be forwarded. Stella had not seen the automobile standing on the opposite side of the street from the boarding-house at Belcher’s Beach the late Saturday night when Ed had brought her back and left her as usual at the foot of the stairs that led up to her room. She had not seen the same automobile the next morning on the Boulevard as she and Ed had started out for lunch in Boston.

The day after Myrtle Holland and Mrs. Kay Bird had seen Alfred Munn follow Stella Dallas into the boarding-house—but had not seen him come out—they had driven to Belcher’s Beach again. Myrtle Holland was occupying a summer cottage, that year, thirty miles inland. She had never been to Belcher’s Beach before. It was only because the chauffeur had lost the road that she happened to be driving through such a place at all. Myrtle Holland wanted to inspect Stella’s boarding-house by daylight. She told Mrs. Kay Bird she wanted to point it out to her husband so he might look it up and see what sort of a place it was.

It chanced to be over the only week-end of Laurel’s absence, when Ed Munn had both a Saturday and Sunday engagement with Stella, that Myrtle Holland and Mrs. Kay Bird made their two visits to Belcher’s Beach. On the second visit they had been almost as excited as on their first. They had seen Ed Munn and Stella Dallas again! The pair were leaving the boarding-house this time! It was eleven in the morning! It looked pretty bad, didn’t it?