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The Straines lived in Philadelphia, probably the happiest couple in the whole of that city. Alison Straine after six years of married life was still, the Professor told her, a mere child in looks and ways; but a child with a good deal of common sense secreted somewhere, despite her many impulses—with more than a child’s gravity lurking behind the brightness which seemed to ripple and flow from eyes and hair and quick, light movements. She adored her husband, and he, Professor Winthrop Straine, Lecturer in Greek and German to the Philadelphian University, fourteen years her senior, had never quite ceased to feel a sense of surprise that this young, sweet, and altogether desirable Alison should have consented to become Mrs. Professor Straine.

Given so warm and tender-hearted a couple, it is not very surprising to learn that when the Professor’s automobile knocked down and badly hurt a small, shabby boy, not a hundred yards from the Straines’ door, Winthrop should refuse all suggestions of public or even private hospitals made by friendly policemen, and should have the unconscious victim carried straightway home and lodged in a spare room, where, an hour later, doctors and an austere-faced nurse had made the boy as comfortable as a badly fractured thigh would permit. He had only recovered consciousness in time to be given an anæsthetic while the bone was set, and now lay silent and dazed, a pathetic small figure in the smooth white bed.