CHAPTER XII
1
At the same moment that Laurel, high up above the rumbling traffic of New York, was packing her trunk on the last day of her never-to-be-forgotten visit to her father (never to be forgotten because of the wonderful Mrs. Morrison), Stella several hundred miles away, was also packing a trunk.
There was no sound of traffic outside Stella's window, only the distant pound of the surf and a distant glimpse of a deserted board-walk. By the end of September there were only three or four people left at the boarding-house at Belcher's Beach. By the middle of September at least half of the amusement booths on the board-walk had been closed for the season.
Stella had remained until the literal eve of Laurel's return, because she had been very lucky this year, and had found a tenant for her rooms at the King Arthur for the month of September. Laurel could have her fur coat and wrist-watch, too, now! My, though, but Stella was glad her job was over! She did hate horrid places so, and horrid people, and run-down, second-rate boarding-house styles and customs—loud talk and loud laughter and loud women, and flies and dirt, and bathing-suits hanging out all the front windows to dry (that is, when the season was still on), and bathing-corsets, and bathing-garters. ("Honest, Effie, you'd think some peo-
