Hope had never died that sometime she and Stephen might live beneath the same roof again. The possibility that when the golden harvest-time arrived when Laurel was old enough to come out, Stephen, too, would wish to give his child every possible advantage, and resume at least the semblance of a conventional relationship with his wife, had been for years a sort of secret candle Stella would take out and light whenever it seemed dark. But a divorce, a separation would rob her of her candle. Besides, she couldn’t say “my husband” any more, could she, to her friends and acquaintances? Not refer to her husband’s absence as temporary. Oh, no one knew what a protection the uncertainty had been to her all these years.

At one o’clock the next morning Stella lay wide awake in her bed beside Laurel’s empty one, tossing and turning in the darkness, reviewing the contents of each of the three cruel notes that had swept so bare her little hill of hopes, and left it bleak and desolate. At two o’clock she was still awake, and again at three she heard the chimes ringing in the Episcopal Church belfry, a half a mile away. At half-past three she got up and went into the bathroom. She poured herself out half a glass of gin, and filled the glass up with hot water from the faucet. She placed two sleeping-tablets on the back of her tongue and washed them down with the strong hot drink.

Laurel was due to arrive the next morning at nine o’clock. Stella simply must pull herself together before Laurel arrived.

Chapter 13

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

1

“I SHOULDN’T THINK that Simpson woman earned her salt. She’s let your nails get into a terrible condition!” scolded Stella.

“Oh, but Miss Simpson never does my nails, Mother,” laughed Laurel.

She and Stella were seated opposite each other at a card-table in their bedroom at the King Arthur. There was a bath-towel spread over the table. Laurel held the finger-tips of one hand in a bowl filled with warm water, while her mother worked over the other. It was early afternoon of the first day of Laurel’s arrival.

“Gracious, Laurel, this cuticle hasn’t been pushed back once since you’ve been gone, I’ll bet. I don’t know what will become of you if you don’t take more pains with yourself. These nails of yours are all split and broken to pieces.”

“But I’ve been camping, Mother.”

“I should think you’d been mining, and using your fingers for pickaxes!”

A cat no more vigorously sets herself to work over the deplorable condition of her kitten after a visit to the coal-bin than did Stella over Laurel after her visit to New York and the Maine woods, “where they lived like animals,” according to her way of thinking.