finger on the little brown beauty-spot and pressed it gently.
"I wonder," she whispered.
6
The distance between Mrs. Bean's lodging-house and the little red cottage was only a quarter of a mile. It took Stephen less than ten minutes to walk it. Mrs. Bean's boarding-house was an impossible place in which to spend the evening. The walks around and about the boarding-house had come to seem impossible, too. So also had the bare, white-lighted, white-walled reading-room at the Milhampton Public Library.
Ever since Stephen had come to Milhampton (up to the time he met Stella), each night, when he finished his supper in the boarding-house dining-room, he was faced with the problem of killing two and a half hours somehow till a civilized hour for sleep arrived. But after he met Stella, and found the straight, easy way that led to the red cottage, there was no more problem as to how to spend his evenings—at least as to how he wanted to spend them.
If Stephen's mother hadn't died just when she did; and if, on top of that, Stephen's sister Fanny hadn't received, in reply to an application she had made to teach in a girls' boarding-school in Japan, summons to sail immediately, Stephen's infatuation would probably have burned itself out before he was in a position to consider additional financial burdens of any sort.
Suddenly Stephen found himself free and unfet-
