"Afraid!" asked Joan. She wished to know every least detail of the story now.
"Afraid lest I should take—something ... as I wished to do ... as during the trouble of the divorce I learned to do."
She related little ridiculous incidents which Joan listened to with a breaking heart. Stella could not sleep at all after her return. She lived in a little house with a big garden on the northern edge of London, and all night she lay awake, listening to the patter of rain on melancholy trees, and thinking and thinking. Harry Luttrell kept her from the drugs in her dressing-case. She had no anodyne for her sorrows—but one.
"You will laugh," said Stella with a little wry smile of her own, "when I tell you what it was. It was a gramophone. I got Harry to set it going, whilst I lay in bed—to set it playing rag-time. While it was playing, I stopped thinking. For I had to keep time in my brain with the beat of the tune. And so, at last, since I couldn't think, or remember, I fell asleep. The gramophone saved me"; and again Joan was smitten by the incongruity of Stella with her life. She had eaten of all that nature allots to women—love, marriage, the birth of children, the loss of them—and there she was, to this day half-child, and quite incompatible with what she had suffered and endured.
"After a fortnight I got quieter of course," said Stella. "And suddenly a change sadder than anything I have told you took place in me. I suppose that I had gone through too much on baby's account for me. I lost something more than my baby, I lost my want to have her with me."
She remained silent for a little while reviewing the story which she had told.
"There, that's all," she said, rising suddenly. "It's no claim at all, of course. I know that very well. Harry left me at Stockholm four years ago;" and suddenly Joan's face flushed scarlet. She had been absorbed in Stella's sorrows, she had admired that kind action of Harry Luttrell's which had brought so much trouble in its train. It needed that reminder that Harry had only left Stella Croyle at Stockholm to bring home the whole part which Harry had taken in the affair. Now she understood; a flame of sudden jealousy confused her; and with it came a young girl's distaste as though some ugly reptile had raised its head amongst flowers.
"I never saw Harry again until this week, except for a minute outside a shop one morning in Piccadilly. But he hasn't married during those four years, so I always kept a hope that we should be somewhere together again for a few days, and that afterwards he would come back to me."
"That's why you chose this week to come to Rackham Park?"
"Yes," answered Stella Croyle; and she laughed harshly. "But I hadn't considered you."