I held on to Billy.  “Had you quarreled or anything?”

He ran his fingers through his hair.  “Things had gone wrong somehow,” he said, uncertainly, “I don’t know why.  I love her.”

If you could have heard him say it!  If she could have heard him!  There was a silence out of which I said:  “Did you ask her to warm your slippers?”

He stared at me, then he reached out his hands across the table and caught hold of mine in such a strong grip that it hurt.  “You’ve seen her,” he said, “you’ve seen her—?”

Then I remembered.  “I can’t say any more.  You see—­I’ve promised—­”

“That you wouldn’t tell me?”

“Yes.”

He threw back his head and laughed.  “If she’s in this part of the country, I’ll find her.”  And I knew that he would.  He was the kind of man you felt wouldn’t know there were obstacles in the way when he went after the thing he wanted.

I made him stay to supper.  It was a drizzly cold night and he looked very tired.

“Jove,” he said, “you’re comfortable here, with your fire and your pussy-cat, and your teakettle on the hearth!  This is the sort of thing I like—­”

“You wouldn’t like living over a grocery store,” I told him.

“Why not?”

“Oh, nobody around here ever has, and they are all descended from signers of the Declaration of Independence and back of that from William the Conqueror, and they stick their noses in the air.”

“Shades of Jefferson!—­why should they?”

“They shouldn’t.  But they do—­”

He came back to the subject of his wife.  “I didn’t want her to warm my slippers.  It was only that I wanted her to feel like warming them,” he appealed to Billy, and Billy nodded.  Billy positively purrs when I make him comfortable after his day’s work.  He says that it is the homing instinct in men and that women ought to encourage it.

“Does she warm yours?” he asked Billy.

“Not now, she’s too busy—­” and then as if the stage were set for it, there came from the next room a little, little cry.

I went in and brought out—­Junior!  He was only a month old, but you know how heavenly sweet they are with their rose-leaf skins, and their little crumpled hands and their downy heads—­Junior’s down was brown, for Billy and I are both dark.

“You see he keeps me busy,” I said.

I was so proud I am perfectly sure it stuck out all over me, and as for Billy he beamed on us in a funny fatherly fashion that he had adopted from the moment that he first called me “Little Mother.”

“Do you wonder that she hasn’t time to warm my slippers?” was his question.

The stranger held out his arms—­“Let me hold the little chap.”  And he sat there, without a smile, looking down at my baby.  When he raised his head he said in a dry sort of fashion, “I thought the pussy-cat and the teakettle were enough—­but this seems almost too good to be true—­”