Page:Stella Dallas, a novel (IA stelladallasnove00prou).pdf/300



proof that Helen's rainbow was real—no illusion, no mirage—came in the form of a shadow the following fall. It is dark by five o'clock in the afternoon in New York in November. Returning one late afternoon with Laurel from a tea, where with a dozen other girls of her own age she had been assisting (nominally assisting, but really, like the others, simply submitting herself to the demands of a crowd of young men blocking the entrance to the room cleared for dancing), Helen observed, as she left the car and crossed the sidewalk to her own door a shadow, a stationary shadow cast upon the sidewalk.

There was an alley ran down to a rear entrance at the spot where the shadow fell. There was a light a few feet down the alley. The light was dim. But in spite of the unrecognizable shape of the blurred outline of the shadow, it had startled Helen into a sudden suspicion.

Once inside the house she had mounted to an upper room, where there was no light, where she would attract no attention, and raising the drawn shade in a bay-window, gazed down into the alley, just back of the spot where the shadow had lain.

There was no one there now.

Quickly she turned and raised the shade of the window opposite. This window looked toward the