The voices from the entrance hall stopped abruptly. They heard Marian make a peculiar noise, halfway between a squeal and a scream. Both men leaped to their feet and ran through the archway to her.

She was in the foyer, standing beside Bruce Robertson. Her eyes were shut and she had one hand on the wall as if it alone kept her from falling.

“I’m sorry I upset her, Stew,” the book illustrator said rapidly. His face was very pale. “You see, I want to adopt Lisa. Frank Tyler told me what happened today.”

“You? You want to—But you’re a bachelor!”

“Yes, but I’m in a five-child bracket income. I can adopt Lisa if I can prove that I can give her as good a home as a married couple might. Well, I can. All I want is for her last name to be changed legally to Robertson—I don’t care what name she uses in school or with her friends—and she’ll go on staying here, with me providing for her maintenance. The FPB would consider that the best possible home.”

Raley stared at Boettiger. The lawyer nodded. “It would. Besides that, if the natural parents express any wishes for a feasible adoptive situation, the weight of administrative action tends to be thrown in that direction. But what would you be getting out of that, young man?”

“I’d be getting a child—officially,” Robertson told him. “I’d be getting a kid I could talk about, boast about, when other men boast about theirs. I’m sick and tired of being a no-child bachelor. I want to be somebody.”

“But you might want to get married one day,” Raley said, putting his arm about his wife, who had let a long breath out and turned to him. “You might want to get married and have children of your own.”