“What’s the trouble, Stepan—­swallowed your spoon?” Stepan was known to be greedy.  Or he would suddenly seize an unusually solemn boy from behind and tickle him until the child screamed with laughter.  It was, indeed, something of an achievement to get on terms of confidence with these alien children of the tenements and the streets who from their earliest years had been forced to shift for themselves, and many of whom had acquired a precocious suspicion of Greeks bearing gifts.  Insall himself had used the phrase, and explained it to Janet.  That sense of caveat donor was perhaps their most pathetic characteristic.  But he broke it down; broke down, too, the shyness accompanying it, the shyness and solemnity emphasized in them by contact with hardship and poverty, with the stark side of life they faced at home.  He had made them—­Mrs. Maturin once illuminatingly remarked—­more like children.  Sometimes he went to see their parents,—­as in the case of Marcus—­to suggest certain hygienic precautions in his humorous way; and his accounts of these visits, too, were always humorous.  Yet through that humour ran a strain of pathos that clutched—­despite her smile—­at Janet’s heartstrings.  This gift of emphasizing and heightening tragedy while apparently dealing in comedy she never ceased to wonder at.  She, too, knew that tragedy of the tenements, of the poor, its sordidness and cruelty.  All her days she had lived precariously near it, and lately she had visited these people, had been torn by the sight of what they endured.  But Insall’s jokes, while they stripped it of sentimentality of which she had an instinctive dislike—­made it for her even more poignant.  One would have thought, to have such an insight into it, that he too must have lived it, must have been brought up in some dirty alley of a street.  That gift, of course, must be a writer’s gift.

When she saw the waifs trooping after him down the stairs, Mrs. Maturin called him the Pied Piper of Hampton.

As time went on, Janet sometimes wondered over the quiet manner in which these two people, Insall and Mrs. Maturin, took her visits as though they were matters of course, and gave her their friendship.  There was, really, no obvious excuse for her coming, not even that of the waifs for food—­and yet she came to be fed.  The sustenance they gave her would have been hard to define; it flowed not so much from what they said, as from what they were; it was in the atmosphere surrounding them.  Sometimes she looked at Mrs. Maturin to ask herself what this lady would say if she knew her history, her relationship with Ditmar—­which had been her real reason for entering the ranks of the strikers.  And was it fair for her, Janet, to permit Mrs. Maturin to bestow her friendship without revealing this?  She could not make up her mind as to what this lady would say.  Janet had had no difficulty in placing Ditmar; not much trouble, after her first surprise was over, in classifying Rolfe and the itinerant band