She went back to her place, determining that she would set out a little supper of cake and crackers and cheese for him to find when his room-mate and he came in tired and wet from their theatre that night.  She looked at Teddy; would he keep a birthday in a boarding-house some day with only the housekeeper to mother him?

“We’re betting that you’re younger than I am, Mrs. Bannister!”

“You win.”  She smiled at him frankly.  “I’m not yet twenty-four!” Martie was conscious of a little pang as she met his surprised almost pitying look.

“I think that talk about ages was just a little undignified,” said Edna Winchell later that night.

“Yes, I do, too!” her mother answered quickly.

“There’s something about that girl we don’t understand, you bet,” contributed the son.  “When I went down for a match she was just getting a special delivery letter, and she looked as if she was going to drop.  You mark my words—­it had something to do with that mysterious husband of hers!”

For the boarding-house had never seen Wallace, who held the whole place in bitter scorn.  He resented the fact of Martie’s position there; the fact of her having made herself useful to old Mrs. Curley represented a difference in their point of view.  When, in Teddy’s first year, regular letters and a regular remittance from Wallace ceased to appear, Martie had gone through an absolute agony of worry.  Her husband was then on the road, and she was not even sure that her letters reached him.

Alone except for the baby, in the freezing, silent cold of the city, she had pondered, planned, and fretted for day after weary day.  The one or two acquaintances she had made in Wallace’s profession would have advised her not to worry, nobody ever was turned out for board in these days.  But Martie was too proud to appeal to them for counsel, and for other but even stronger reasons she could not confide in Mrs. Curley.  So passed the first Christmas alone, doubly sad because it reminded her of the Christmas a year before, when they had been so happy and so prosperous in San Francisco.

In snowy February, however, Mrs. Curley herself had unconsciously offered a solution.  She wanted to go to her daughter in Brooklyn for a fortnight.  “Run the house for me, that’s the good girl,” she said to Martie.  “You can do it as good as I can, any day of the world!  Aurora knows what the menus for the week are and all you’ve got to do is to do the ordering and show the rooms to folks that come looking for them.”

Martie had been feeling a little more comfortable about her overdue board, because Wallace, playing in stock in Los Angeles, had sent her one hundred dollars early in the year.  It was not enough, but it sufficed to pay a comfortable installment on her bill, and to keep her in money for another week or two.  But she was sick of waiting and worrying, and she seized the opportunity to be helpful.  Chance favoured her, for during the old woman’s