years had been forced to shift for themselves, and many of
whom had acquired a precocious suspicion of Greeks bearing gifts. Insall
himself had used the phrase, and explained it to Janet. That sense of
caveat donor was perhaps their most pathetic characteristic. But he
broke it down; broke down, too, the shyness accompanying it, the shyness
and solemnity emphasized in them by contact with hardship and poverty,
with the stark side of life they faced at home. He had made them--Mrs.
Maturin once illuminatingly remarked--more like children. Sometimes he
went to see their parents,--as in the case of Marcus--to suggest certain
hygienic precautions in his humorous way; and his accounts of these
visits, too, were always humorous. Yet through that humour ran a strain
of pathos that clutched--despite her smile--at Janet's heartstrings.
This gift of emphasizing and heightening tragedy while apparently
dealing in comedy she never ceased to wonder at. She, too, knew that
tragedy of the tenements, of the poor, its sordidness and cruelty. All
her days she had lived precariously near it, and lately she had visited
these people, had been torn by the sight of what they endured. But
Insall's jokes, while they stripped it of sentimentality of which she
had an instinctive dislike--made it for her even more poignant. One
would have thought, to have such an insight into it, that he too must
have lived it, must have been brought up in some dirty alley of a
street. That gift, of course, must be a writer's gift.

When she saw the waifs trooping after him down the stairs, Mrs. Maturin
called him the Pied Piper of Hampton.

As time went on, Janet sometimes wondered over the quiet manner in which
these two people, Insall and Mrs. Maturin, took her visits as though
they were matters of course, and gave her their friendship. There was,
really, no obvious excuse for her coming, not even that of the waifs
for food--and yet she came to be fed. The sustenance they gave her would
have been hard to define; it flowed not so much from what they said,
as from what they were; it was in the atmosphere surrounding them.
Sometimes she looked at Mrs. Maturin to ask herself what this lady would
say if she knew her history, her relationship with Ditmar--which had
been her real reason for entering the ranks of the strikers. And was
it fair for her, Janet, to permit Mrs. Maturin to bestow her friendship
without revealing this? She could not make up her mind as to wha