The man lowered his head and murmured obsequiously.  The table-d’hote dinner was served only on the balcony, sir.

This caused a halt in the rising gaiety.  The group looked a little blank.  They were established here, the ladies had surrendered their wraps, envious late-comers were eying their table.  Still Martie did not hesitate.  She straightened back in her chair, and pushed her hands at full length upon the table, preliminary to rising.

“Then we’ll go up!” she said sensibly.  But Wallace demurred.  What was the difference!  They would stay here.

The difference proved to be about twenty dollars.

“I hope it was worth it to you!” Wallace said bitterly to his wife at breakfast the next day.  “Twenty-six dollars the check was.  It was worth about twenty-six cents to me!”

“But, Wallie, you didn’t have to order wine!”

“I didn’t expect to order it, and if that boob had had the sense to know it, it was up to him to pay for it!”

“Why, he’s a perfect babe-in-the-woods about such things, Wallie!  And none of us wanted it!” Martie tried to speak quietly, but at the memory of the night before her anger began to smoulder.  Wallace had deliberately urged the ordering of wine, John quite as innocently disclaimed it.  Adele had laughed that she could always manage a glass of champagne; Martie had merely murmured, “But we don’t need it, Wallie; we’ve had so much now!”

“We couldn’t sit there holding that table down all evening,” Wallace said now.  Martie with a great effort kept silence.  Opening his paper, her husband finished the subject sharply.  “I want to tell you right now, Mart, that with me ordering the dinner, it was up to him to pay for the wine!  Any man would know that!  Ask any one of the crowd.  He’s a boob, that’s all, and I’m done with him!”

Martie rose, and went quietly into the kitchen.  There was nothing to say.  She did not speak of the Drydens again for a long while.  Her own condition engrossed her; and she was not eager to take the initiative in hospitality or anything else.

In April Wallace went on the road again for eleven weeks, and Martie and Ted enjoyed a delicious spring together.  They spent hours on the omnibuses, hours in the parks.  Spring in the West was cold, erratic; spring here came with what a heavenly wash of fragrance and heat!  It was like a re-birth to abandon all the heavy clothing of the winter, to send Teddy dancing into the sunshine in socks and galatea and straw hat again!

Martie’s son was almost painfully dear to her.  Every hour of his life, from the helpless days in the big hospital, through creeping and stammering and stumbling, she had clung to his little phases with hungry adoration, and that there was a deep sympathy between their two natures she came to feel more strongly every day.  They talked confidentially together, his little body jolting against hers on the jolting omnibus, or leaning against her knees as she sat in