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Updated: May 6, 2025
He seldom spoke to her now except of most matter-of-fact things. He played his part like a gentleman before others, but alone with her he withdrew into his shell. Stella was sitting back in the shadow, still studying him, measuring him in spite of herself by the Monohan yardstick. There wasn't much basis for comparison.
She was scarcely aware how far they had traveled along that road whereon travelers converse by glance of eye, by subtle intuitions, eloquent silences. Monohan himself delivered the shock that awakened her to despairing clearness of vision. He had come to bring her a book, he and Linda Abbey and Charlie together, a commonplace enough little courtesy.
You'll be sorry if you do. There's not a man or woman whose relations with Monohan have been intimate enough to enable them to really know the man and his motives who doesn't either hate or fear or despise him, and sometimes all three." "That's a sweeping indictment," Stella said stiffly. "And you're very earnest. Yet I can hardly take your word at its face value.
Life could have held so much that is fine and true for you and me together. For you do care, don't you?" "What difference does that make?" she whispered. "What difference can it make? Oh, you mustn't tell me these things, I mustn't listen. I mustn't." "But they're terribly, tragically true," Monohan returned. "Look at me, Stella. Don't turn your face away, dear.
She could not discuss Monohan with him, with any one. Why should she ask? she told herself. It was a closed book, a balanced account. One does not revive dead issues. The month of November slid day by day into the limbo of the past. The rains washed the land unceasingly. Gray veilings of mist and cloud draped the mountain slopes. As drab a shade colored Stella Fyfe's daily outlook.
How did you get here so soon? How could you? There's no train." Stella told her. "Why should Monohan shoot him?" she broke out. "For God's sake, talk, Linda!" There was a curious impersonality in Linda's manner, as if she stood aloof from it all, as if the fire of her vitality had burned out. She lay back in her chair with eyelids drooping, speaking in dull, lifeless tones.
Don't look at me like that, Stella. I'm not saying this just to wound you. I'm simply putting you on your guard. You can't play with fire and not get burned. If you've been nursing any feeling for Walter Monohan, crush it, cut it out, just as you'd have a surgeon cut out a cancer. Entirely apart from any question of Jack Fyfe, don't let this man play any part whatever in your life.
But she was equally sure that the old illusions would never serve. She couldn't even make him happy, much less herself. Monohan well, Monohan was a dead issue. He had come to the Charteris to see her, all smiles and eagerness. She had been able to look at him and through him and cut him dead and do it without a single flutter of her heart.
If she doesn't, she's simply a sponge, clinging to a man for what's in it. I couldn't bear that. You've been rather painfully frank; so will I be. One unhappy marriage is quite enough for me. Looking back, I can see that even if Walter Monohan hadn't stirred a feeling in me which I don't deny, but which I'm not nearly so sure of as I was some time ago, I'd have come to just this stage, anyway.
But more chairs were brought, and the eternal questioning about the dynamite went on. When Warden Atherton grew tired, Captain Jamie relieved him; and then the guard Monohan took Captain Jamie's place in smashing me down into the chair. And always it was dynamite, dynamite, "Where is the dynamite?" and there was no dynamite.
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