rs 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 visit the daughter in Brooklyn fell
ill, and it was mid-March before the mother came home again. By that
time the trembling Martie had weathered several storms, had rented the
long-vacant front room, and was more brisk and happy than she had been
for months, than she had ever been perhaps. So the arrangement drifted
along. There was no talk of a salary then, but in time Martie came to
ask for such money as she needed--for Teddy's rompers, for gingham
dresses for summer, for stationery and stamps--and it was always
generously accorded.

"Get good things while you're about it," Mrs. Curley would say. "You
buy for the ragman when you buy trash. This lad here," she would
indicate the splendid Teddy, with his loose dark curls and his creamy
skin, "he wants to look elegant, so that the girls will ru