“It’s John!” predicted Adele.  A moment later her husband came into the room.  Like his wife, he was cold and wet and rosy from the street, but he had evidently been upstairs, for he wore his old house-coat and dry slippers, and had brushed his hair.  He was younger than Adele by three or four years, but he looked like a boy of twenty; squarely built, not tall, but giving an impression of physical power nevertheless.  Martie had first thought his face odd, then interesting; now she found it strangely attractive.  His eyes, between sandy lashes and under thick sandy brows, were of a sea-blue in colour, his head was covered with a cap of thick, lustreless, sand-coloured hair.  Something odd, elfin, whimsical, in his crooked smile lent an actual charm to his face, for Martie at least.  She told him he looked like Pan.

Early in their acquaintance she had asked him if he were not a Dane, not a Norwegian, if he had not viking blood?  She said that he suggested sagas and berserkers and fjords—­“not that I am sure what any of those words mean!” His answering laugh had been as wild as a delighted child’s.  No; he was American-born, of an English father and an Irish mother, he said.  He had never been abroad, never been to college, never had any family that he remembered, except Adele.  He had meant to be a “merchant sailor”—­a term he seemed to like, although it conveyed only a vague impression to Martie—­but his lungs hadn’t been strong.  So he went to Arizona and loafed.  And there he met Adele; her mother kept the boarding-house in which he lived, in fact, and there they were married.  Adele had a glorious voice and she wanted to come to New York to cultivate it.  And then Adele had been ill.

His voice fell reverently when he spoke of this illness.  Adele had nearly died.  What the hope that had also really died at this time meant to him, Martie could only suspect when she saw him with Teddy.  Adele herself told her that she was never strong enough for new hopes.

“We couldn’t afford it, of course; so perhaps it was just as well,” said Adele one day when she and Martie had come to be good friends, and were confidential.  “I felt terribly for a while, because I have a wonderful way with children; I know that myself.  They always come to me—­funniest thing!  Dr. Poole was saying the other day that I had a remarkable magnetism.  I said, ’I don’t know about that,’—­and I don’t, Martie!  I don’t think I’m so magnetic, do you—­’but,’ I said, ‘I really do seem to have a hold on children!’ Jack loves children, too, but he spoils them.  I don’t believe in letting children run a house; it isn’t good for them, and it isn’t good for you.  Let them have their own toys and treat them as kindly as possible, but—–­”