It looked still worse when Mrs. Holland called at the fashionable hotel, where Mrs. Kay Bird had heard Stella Dallas was spending the season, and discovered that Mrs. Dallas hadn’t been there for three weeks! And that her forwarding address was care of a Mrs. Effie McDevitt, in a very queer part of Milhampton, way down by the mills somewhere. Obviously Stella Dallas had done her best to cover up her tracks. Oh wasn’t it all too shocking for anything?

“Probably those two have been carrying on their little affair, off and on, ever since the scandal about them when her husband left her. I wouldn’t believe then that she’d really gone the limit (I’m always slow at jumping to conclusions of that sort); but now, I do not see that we can very well help thinking the worst. My husband says that Belcher’s Beach is full of questionable places. He didn’t care to go into an investigation of that particular one, but you could see by looking at it—so dirty, and run-down, and ramshackle—and by observing the women who came out of it, what sort of a place it was. Stella Dallas herself looked a little more common and ordinary than ever—paint just piled on, and that riding-teacher—Munn—has degenerated terribly. Oh, it makes my blood boil to think that the mother of one of the girls, with whom our daughters associate daily at the little private school we’re all supporting and protecting to the best of our ability, should be carrying on an affair of that sort with a man of that sort in a place of that sort. As one of the trustees of Miss Fillibrown’s School there’s only one course open to me. A thing like that cannot be known about a woman and countenanced, can it?”

“Certainly not,” was the general dictum.

“I for one won’t countenance it anyhow,” announced Mrs. Kay Bird, with emphasis. “Either Mrs. Dallas moves out of the King Arthur or I do. I had to play bridge with her twice last winter!”

“And either her child is removed from Miss Fillibrown’s or mine is,” another voice proclaimed.

This conversation took place in Myrtle Holland’s living-room a few days after her return to Milhampton, in late September. There were half a dozen women gathered around the tea-table.

“But,” feebly observed one of them, “there’s just a possibility that you’re mistaken, Myrtle, isn’t there?”

“Oh, sweet protector of the innocent, virtuous defender of the maligned,” laughed Mrs. Kay Bird.