He sat down beside her, and rumpled his hair in furious embarrassment and excitement, studying her with a wistful and puzzled smile.  She did not realize how her pale face, loosely massed hair, and black-rimmed eyes impressed him.

“John!  I am so glad!  Tell me everything; how are you, and how’s Adele?”

Adele was well.  He was well.  His wife’s sister, Mrs. Baker of Browning, Indiana, was visiting them.  Things were much the same at the office.  He had not been reading anything particularly good.

She laughed at his sparse information.

“But, John—­talk!  Have you been to any lectures lately?  What have you been doing?” she demanded.

“I’ve been thinking for days of what we should talk about when we saw each other,” he said, laughing excitedly.  “But now that I’m here I can’t remember them!”

The sense his presence always gave her, of being at ease, of being happily understood, was enveloping Martie.  She was as comfortable with John as she might have been with Sally, as sure of his affection and interest.  She suddenly realized that she had missed John of late, without quite knowing what it was she missed.

“You’re going on with your writing, John?”

“Oh”—­he rumpled his hair again—­“what’s the use?”

“Why, that’s no way to talk.  Aren’t you doing anything?”

“Not much,” he grinned boyishly.

“But, John, that’s sheer laziness!  How do you ever expect to get out of the groove, if you don’t make a start?”

“Oh, damn it all, Martie,” he said mildly, with a whimsical smile, “what’s the use?  I suppose there isn’t a furniture clerk in the city that doesn’t feel he is fit for great things!”

“You didn’t talk like this last year,” Martie said, in disappointment and reproach.  John looked at her uneasily, and then said boldly: 

“How’s Ted?”

“Sweet.”  Martie laid one hand on her breast, and drew a short, stifled breath.  “Isn’t it fearful?” she said, of the heat.

John nodded absently:  she knew him singularly unaffected by anything so trivial as mere heat or cold.  He was fingering a magazine carelessly, suddenly he flung it aside.

“I am writing something, of course!” he confessed.  “But it seems sort of rotten, to me.”

“But I’m glad!” she said, with shining eyes.

“I work at it in the office,” John added.  “And what is it?”

“You know what it is:  you suggested it!”

“I did?”

“You said it would make a good play.”

Martie’s thin cheek dimpled, she widened her eyes.

“I don’t remember!”

“It was when I was reading Strickland’s ‘Queens.’  You said that this one’s life would make a good play.”

“Oh, I do dimly remember!” She knotted her brows.  “Mary—­Mary Isabelle—­an Italian girl?—­wasn’t it?”

“Mary Beatrice,” he corrected simply.