"Yes," said Nan quietly. "I've no doubt she's true. And she's a very lucky woman."

"Lucky?" repeated Raven, staring. "She's the most unfortunate creature I ever saw. Lucky! what do you mean by that?"

"Well," said Nan, and now she spoke with an edge in her voice, "what's she going to do about it? She's in danger of her life, you say." He nodded absently, his mind going back to that word, lucky. "She's afraid of her husband, afraid he'll kill her."

"Not so much that as afraid he'll kill the child."

"Well, then, isn't she going to leave him?"

"No. She won't."

"Have you asked her?"

"Oh, yes," said Raven. "I asked her at once. I told her I'd send her away from here, find her something to do: just what anybody'd say in a case like that."

"And she wouldn't let you?"

"She wouldn't let me."

"Why not?" asked Nan. "Does she—love the brute?"

She might have flicked a lash across his face and his nerves winced under it. There was, she saw, in his mind, something disparaging to the woman in coupling her with a softness misplaced.

"I don't know," he said, with a thoughtful precision. "Sometimes I think she's all mother: doesn't care about anything but the child. I know she's square, knew it at once, but that doesn't mean I know any more about her. She's a locked door to me."

His tone was low, but it told Nan how he wished the door would open and let him in to persuade her to her own well-being. She looked at him a moment, as he stood staring down at his feet where a ragged wisp of yellowed brake came through the snow, looked as if he hurt her beyond endurance, and yet she had to probe ill circumstance to its depths. Then she spoke, but in her old voice of childlike gentleness toward him:

"I see. I really believe, Rookie, I do see."

He looked up at her in a palpable relief.

"That's a good girl," he said. Again she was half child to him. "You'll take a hand, too, won't you?"

That was more than she had bargained for. She would believe in the mysterious woman and leave him free to carry out any mission, however sophistical or chivalrous, he would. But she had not expected to enter the arena with him and defend the martyr thrown to the wild beast of marital savagery. Raven felt her recoil.

"I can't do anything for her," he pursued, with a discouragement she read. "Anything real, that is. I can give her the shelter of the hut, but he'll find that out some day and go crashing in. I can't be there always. Fact is, I can't be there at all."

"Yes," said Nan. "I see." There was in her voice a sweetness new to him. "I'll do anything you say, Rookie, to make your mind easy. What do you want me to do. Take her away from here?"

He considered a moment. Yes, that was really what he did want. She had put the words into his mouth.

"But," said Nan practically, "what you've got to do now is to go down to the house and be tried for your life. Your sister'll be there something after two. And Dick. And the alienist."

Raven shrugged his shoulders as if he shook them free of a burden.

"I don't care anything about the alienist," he said. "Nor Dick. I do care a lot about Amelia. She's an awful bore. But it can't be helped. Come on down."

"You know," said Nan tentatively, as they took the road, "we could ask Charlotte for a luncheon and go off over the mountain. You've got snowshoes, haven't you?"

Raven shook his head.

"You can't foil Amelia," he said, "by running away from her. She'd camp for the winter. Or she'd get on our trail and follow us. No, we've got to see it through."



XVI

At the house they found Charlotte, in a silent alertness, making ready for the guests whom Nan, before going up to the hut, had announced to her. She was systematically refusing to be flurried, but Raven knew that Amelia, with her rigid conventions and perilous activity, was a disquieting guest. Remembering that, he took the incident with an ostentatious lightness, and Nan followed his lead. Presently Charlotte's kind face relaxed, and when they saw she was continuing her preparations with a less troubled brow, Raven took Nan upstairs to the great west room made ready for his sister with a fire roaringly active. There he installed her, and when she reminded him that the room had been wakened from its winter drowse to this exhilaration for Amelia, he bade her "hush up and stay put." Two facts were paramount: she was the first comer and this was the best room. But, Nan said, she wasn't going to stay over night. She should get the six o'clock back to Boston. Raven might here have reflected that, if she had merely the fact of Amelia's coming to break to him, she could have done it by telephone. Was there something in the unexpectedness of finding him immersed in the problem of Tira that had overthrown her preconceived plan? Had she, finding him absorbed in a new association, lost immediate interest in the drama she had mischievously meant to share?

"I take it for granted," she said, "you'll let Jerry carry me to the station."

"No," said Raven, impishly determined, "you're going to stay. You'll borrow nighties and things from Amelia."

"Seethe the kid in its mother's milk?" inquired Nan, her own impishness flashing up, irresistible. "Come up here to undermine her and then borrow her things?"

"Seethe the kid in its own tooth paste," said Raven. "Yes, you're simply going to stay. It's foreordained. Actually you came up here to help me out in more ways than one."

"Did I?" she asked, and reflected. She had one of her moments of clever guesswork over him. Rookie was a simple proposition. She could always, she had once boasted to him, find him out. And reaching about for the clue, suddenly she had it and proclaimed it in triumph.

"I've got it. Your farmer's wife! you want me to do something, something she won't let you do. It's what we said. You want me to take her back with me."

"Yes," he said. "Just that."

They stood looking at each other gravely in the silence of the gaily flowered room with the great blaze rushing up the chimney. It might have seemed that they were measuring each other. Yet they were inadequately matched, for though Raven knew Nan, it was not especially in her relation to him, and she knew herself and him intimately, in their common bond. The woman was the more intuitive, but the man was no less honest. She thought a moment now, her gaze unseeingly following the pattern of the rug at her feet.

"Very well," she said. "I'll go over to the house and get some things, and I'll stay."

There were, they both knew, bureau drawers full of Aunt Anne's things, doubtless in the perfect order that was a part of her exquisite mastery of life. She disliked traveling with a cumbersome outfit, even from the city to this ancestral foothold. Everything possible was left behind her in each place.

"I'll go with you," said Raven. She should not poke into the cold house alone for the first time since she had inherited it, and encounter the desolation of change.

They went downstairs and out into the road, Charlotte looking from the window after them and wondering if they were bound on some jaunt that would leave her to encounter Mrs. Powell undefended. Nan's spirits always came up in the out-of-doors. She was a normal creature, needing to be quickened only by full air. She began to laugh.

"Rookie," she said, "I could tell you something funny."

"Fire away," said Raven.

"It's about my staying. I didn't bring any real things, because I knew I could come over here and get some, but my toothbrush is right here in my coat pocket. Don't you see, Rookie? I was going to stay if you made me, but not if you didn't, and you weren't to know I so much as thought of it."

"Humbug!" said Raven. "I might ha' knowed."

They came to the house, a great yellow square, well back from the road, and there being no path through the snow, Nan boasted of her boots and laughed at him for ordering her to wait until he went back for a shovel. So he strode ahead and broke a path and she followed, and he was not really concerned for her because she looked so fit; it seemed unlikely the natural conditions of nature would hurt her, however hostile. She opened the door with the key produced from her coat pocket and stepped into the great hall, darkened from the obscurity of the rooms on each side where shades had been drawn, and a winter coldness reigned. Nan gave herself no time to shiver over the chill of her homecoming, but ran up the stairs as if she expected to find the sun at the end, and Raven stood in the hall, waiting, and the presence of Anne seemed suddenly beside him, and something he tried to think of as the winter cold (though it was far more penetrating and ethereal) struck him with a chill. Anne, the poignant memory of her, was certainly there with him as he stood absently following with his eyes the bridge-crossed road of the old landscape paper and thinking how different it used to look when the summer sunlight struck it through the open door; and Anne was beating, with her beautiful hands, at his unwilling heart, crying:

"Let me in! let me in to crowd Nan and that common woman out!"

Nan, coming down with a roll under her arm, glanced at him, perturbed. He had, she judged, been seeing ghosts. They went out and locked the door behind them (locking in, Nan silently hoped, the ghosts also), and hurried back along the road. And when they had gone into his house again, Raven told her to run upstairs and put her things in the west chamber.

"Scatter 'em all over the place," said he. "Amelia'll fight for that room. She'll fight tooth and nail. I sha'n't let her have it, not even if you give it up. Understand?"

"But what is she going to have?" Nan asked, from the stairs.

"She's going to sleep down here, back of the dining-room," said Raven perversely, "in the room they made over for Old Crow when they were going to get him to give up the hut and come down here to die. Amelia's scared out of her boots in the country, unless she hears voices on every side of her. I know Amelia. Cut along and come down again and help me set the scene."

They did set the scene, with an exhilaration that played back and forth between them like a heady atmosphere. Charlotte was bidden to make the bed in Old Crow's room and while Raven built the fire, Nan helped Charlotte. And when the pung drove up from the station at the moment Nan had foreseen, she and Raven were sitting before the dining-room fire, apparently deep in talk. Whether Charlotte took her cue from them they did not know, but she was too busy in the back of the house to appear at once, and Mrs. Powell and Dick came in unheralded, turning first to the dining-room. There sat the two, absorbed. The visitors began, on an according note.

"John!" cried Amelia, and "Nan!" Dick cried, in an identical voice. Raven and Nan had the same effect of unison. They laughed, it was so exactly what they had known it would be, and Raven came forward, put his hands on his sister's shoulders, and gave her a little shake.

"Now, Milly," he said, "what the dickens are you up here for?"

Nan, having alienists on her mind, and finding none, was plumping her question at Dick:

"Where's Doctor Brooke?"

Dick evaded it by the self-evident statement that he hadn't come, and ended in a morass of frowning confusion.

Mrs. Powell turned to her with a surprised interrogation, a doubtful warmth. It tried subtly to convey an entire acceptance of her as an individual, combined with disapproval of finding her in the spot she had no excuse for seeking. And while they were exchanging civil commonplaces veiling unspoken implications, Raven was looking at his sister and thinking, in a whimsical terror, what a very large grain of sand she was likely to prove in the machinery of his daily life, and how little she had changed during his absence from America. Here she was, so indomitable in every particular that you could almost believe she was going to be as lasting as the processes that went to her equipment. She had, you learned to know, tackled life as a servant to be governed, an enemy to be downed. If it had antidotes, she would lose no moment in equipping herself with them. If circumstance proved unfriendly, she would ignore it and forge ahead. She was, Raven had always recognized, the feminine replica of his father's special type. As to her looks, she was a thin, whip-like woman, who gave an impression of wiry endurance and serviceable resiliency. You would expect her to be hard to the touch, mental or moral, and yet she could double, evade, rebound. Put her in a hole, and she soon proved to you that its obscurity was the last place where she proposed to stay. She looked the latest thing evolved by the art of man. Her clothes were the prevailing fantastic creation, and yet, on her, they were not illogical. They were the plumage of an eccentric bird hatched to look that way. Her face, in its sandy monotone of color, fitted the art of her wonderful and yet not too noticeable hat, and her gloves and veil were the last word of style. Amelia had begun making herself, Raven used to think, long before God stopped making her. As a girl, she had gone after strange gods of culture and aestheticism, forsaking them, when they toppled, for newer gods still; but always she was undaunted, always persisting in her determined pose of governing the situation and her own attitude toward it. And Amelia, he knew, could hang on like grim death.

"But Nan!" she was exclaiming, "who'd have expected to find you here?"

"Well," said Nan, in the shock of realizing she hadn't quite remembered what Amelia was like, and ranging herself to fight on Rookie's side, "who'd have expected you, Mrs. Powell?"

Dick stood frowning at them impartially and twisting his hat in his hands like a sulky boy.

"Have you opened your house?" Amelia persisted. "You're not staying——"

"She's staying here," said Raven. "Nan's taken pity on me and come up for a visit. Oh, Charlotte! here you are. Show Mrs. Powell to her room, will you?"

Charlotte appearing, white-aproned, in the doorway, looking like the beneficent goddess of home, Mrs. Powell greeted her urbanely and asked appropriate questions. Was she well, as well as she looked? And how was her husband? Always well, she remembered. Yes, she would go to her room, please. But she'd go up by herself. She knew the way. She should think so, indeed! And her reminiscent laugh endowed them with the picture of the little girl she had been, born and brought up in this very house.

"Oh, but it isn't up," said Raven cheerfully. "It's the west bedroom."

"Not——" she began, and he nodded, taking her coat from the chair.

"Yes, Old Crow's room. What was going to be his if he hadn't given 'em the slip. I put Nan into the west chamber. You'll be awfully comfortable in that room, Milly. I'll take in your bag."

Amelia, immediately circumspect when she did not see her way, did follow him, but she was in as great a state of suppressed dudgeon as a civilized lady, living by the latest rules, allows herself to be. Dick and Nan, left alone in the dining-room, turned upon each other like two young furies.

"You came up here," said Dick, in a tone of ill-suppressed ire, "to tell him we were coming. I call it a mean trick."

"What about you?" inquired Nan. "You'd better not talk about tricks. Can you think of a meaner one than giving him away to the entire middle west?'"

"The middle west!" echoed Dick bitterly. "I told my mother."

"Yes, you told your mother. And she comes up here with her alienists."

"You'll notice," said Dick icily, "the alienist didn't come."

"I assume," said Nan, "he's expected on the next train. Or he's going to pounce some time when Rookie isn't prepared."

"You little beast!" said Dick. "You don't deserve it, but I'll inform you he isn't coming at all. I choked him off. I told him mother's the one that's dotty or she wouldn't have called him in, and Uncle Jack wasn't a patient and never'd consent if he knew. And he was an awfully decent fellow and said nothing would induce him to come."

"You did, did you?" said Nan ungratefully. "Well, you'd better. You've made enough mischief for one not very inventive young person, don't you think? And wouldn't it seem to you you'd better use your influence with your mother to-morrow morning and get out of here?"

"Out of here?" repeated Dick. "Out of my uncle's house. You act——" here he paused.

"Yes," said Nan, "I do act precisely that way. I act as if I had more right here than you. And I have. For I adore Rookie. And that gives me a right to stay with him and fight for him, and die for him, if I want to. And you don't care a sixpence, or you wouldn't have brought this on him."

Dick, the man, cooled sooner than she. He paled, and stood looking at her. Then he spoke in a voice dulled by wonder:

"I believe you do adore him."

"Of course I do," cried Nan, all her anger of impatience thrilling in her voice. "I love him more than anything in this world or the next and I always did and I always shall."

This Raven, coming back through the hall, heard.

"Good Lord!" he said to himself. "Good Lord!"

So these two, with all the forces of probability and beckoning fortune pushing them together, could not approach even within hailing distance. It was the hideous irony of a world bent on disorder. He walked in on them with a consciously grave aspect of recalling them to their more reasonable selves.

"What are you two scrapping for?" he inquired, and Nan looked at him humbly. She hated to have him bothered by inconsiderable persons like herself and Dick. "Don't you know you've got the universe in your fists for the last time you'll ever have it? You're young——"

There he stopped awkwardly in the enumeration of their presumable blessedness. It was Nan's face that stopped him. It had paled out into a gravity surprising to him: a weariness he had often expected to see on it after her work abroad, but had not yet found there.

"Yes," she said, in a tone that matched her tired face, "we're young enough, if that's all."

The talk displeased her. Nan never liked people to be dull and smudgy with disorderly moods. She kept a firm hand on her own emotions and perhaps she could not remember a time when they had got away from her under other eyes. Aunt Anne was partly responsible for that, and partly the proud shyness of her type.

"No, Rookie," she said, "we won't fight. Not here, anyway. Not in your house."

She held out a careless hand to Dick, who looked at it an instant and then turned sulkily away. "Young cub!" Raven thought. He should have kissed it, even gone on his knees to do it, and placated her with a laughing extravagance. He recalled the words he had caught from her lips when he was coming in and flushed to his forehead over the ringing warmth of them. He bent to the fine hand about relaxing to withdrawal, after Dick's flouting, drew it to his own lips and kissed it: not as he would have had Dick do it but yet with all his heart. As he lifted his head he smiled into her eyes, and their look smote him. It was as if he had somehow hurt her.

"O Rookie!" she said, under her breath.

And at the instant, while they stood awkwardly in the rebound from emotions not recognized, Amelia came out from her bedroom, perfected as to hair and raiment, but obviously on edge and cheerfully determined on not showing it. Evidently she liked Old Crow's room no more than she might have guessed.

"O Lord!" said Raven ruefully to his inner self, "we're going to have a cheerful house-party, now ain't we?"



XVII

The afternoon went off moderately well. Nan forgot the late unpleasantness between her and Dick and assumed they were on their usual terms, a fashion of making up more exasperating to him than the quarrel itself. He was too often, he suspected, out of the picture of her immediate mind. But it was most unproductive to sulk. When she forgot and he reproached her for it, she forgot that also; and now when she suggested a walk he got his cap with a degree of cheerfulness and they went out, leaving Raven and his sister together by the fire, for what proved to be one of the rich afternoons of Raven's life. Amelia sat down at the hearth and put her perfectly shod feet to the blaze.

"Now, John," she said crisply, while he was fidgeting about, wondering whether he dared offer her a book and take himself out of doors, "sit down and tell me all about it."

Raven went to the fire, but stood commanding it and her. He might, he thought, as well meet the issue at once.

"What?" he asked. "What do you want to know?"

"You mustn't think I can't sympathize," she informed him, in the clear tone he recognized as the appropriate one for an advanced woman who sees a task before her—"damned meddlers," he was accustomed to call them in his sessions of silent thought—"you mustn't think I'm not prepared. I've heard lectures on it, and since Dick sent me your letter I've read more or less."

"My letter!" groaned Raven. "If ever a chap was punished for a minute's drunkenness——"

"Drunkenness?" interrupted Amelia incisively.

"Oh, drunkenness of feeling—irresponsibility—don't you know? Didn't you ever hear of a chap's killing himself in a minute of acute discontent because he couldn't stand the blooming show an instant longer? Well, I didn't kill myself. I did something worse. I wrote a letter, and, by an evil chance, it was mailed, and Dick, like a fool, sent it on to you."

"Dick did absolutely right," said Dick's mother conclusively. "We won't discuss that. We'll go into the thing itself."

"What the deuce is the thing?" Raven inquired. "The letter, or my bursting into tears, like a high-strung maiden lady, and calling Dick in to be cried over?"

"Don't evade it," she charged him, with unabated gravity. "We mustn't, either of us. You know what I mean—cafard."

"Cafard!" Then he remembered Dick also had caught up the word, like a missile, and pelted him with it. He gulped. Ordinary speech wasn't going to be adequate. She belonged to this infernal age that lived by phrases. If he told her he was still of the opinion that the world was a disordered place of torment you could only exist in by ignoring its real complexion, she would merely consign him to a cell more scientifically padded, and stand gazing at him through the bars, in solemn sympathy. "So I've gone cafard," he said slowly, looking down at the fire and wondering how to answer a fool according to her folly. Or was she incredibly right? Had he some creeping sickness of the brain, the very nature of which implied his own insensitiveness to it? "Or do you say 'got' cafard? And what's your personal impression of cafard, anyway?"

She had her answer ready. From the little bag in her lap she took out a small sheaf of folded papers, memorandum slips, they seemed to be, and whirled them over in capable fingers.

"It ought to be here," she said absorbedly. "Yes, here it is. No, it isn't either. It must be among my club notes. What Galsworthy says about it, you know. He makes it so clear. Just what they mean by it, the French, how you simply go to pieces. You know, John. Of course you know."

"Yes," said Raven drily, "I heard of it remotely among the boys."

"No wonder it happened to you. Really, you know, John, you ought not to have gone over there at all, not at your age. It was fine of you. I'm not denying that. But there were lots of things you could have done at home: dollar a year men and all that. However, we must take it as we find it. You've got cafard, and we must make sure you have the best thing done for you. Do you see?"

"And what," inquired Raven, curiously, "is the best thing?"

"My idea," she said, pelting on in her habitual manner of manipulation without much regard to the material she was working on, "would be for you to see an alienist."

"I thought," he was beginning mildly, and paused, with a sense of danger. He must, he saw, forego the fun of chaffing her from his awareness that the professional gentleman was to have been sprung on him to-day, and that he knew equally the infliction could only be deferred. But how, she would have questioned, did he get his news? Not, he would have to convince her, through Nan. He amended his attack. "Why didn't you scare one up and bring him along?"

She frowned. Amelia was always restive under raillery.

"We needn't," she said, "go into that. I did hope to arrange it, but Dick upset things frightfully. He has behaved badly, very badly indeed. I hope now to persuade you to call in Doctor Brooke yourself. I should suppose he'd recommend your going into a sanitarium. However, we can't judge till we see what he says. Only, John"—and here she looked at him with some appearance of anxiety, as not knowing how he would take it—"you must give yourself into our hands."

"Whose hands?" asked Raven. "Yours? Dick's?"

"Oh, dear, no, not Dick's." Again she mentally champed her bit. Evidently Dick had exhausted her forbearance on the way up. "He's behaved like a——" Invention failed her. "I do wish," she ended plaintively, "the modern young man and woman had a vestige of respect left—only a vestige—for their elders. They're queerness itself. Now Nan! there's Nan. What's she posting off up here for and settling herself in your house"—in the west chamber, Raven's inner mind ironically supplied—"and acting as if you couldn't pry her out?"

"You can't," said Raven. "Nan's here and I'm going to keep her, all winter, if she doesn't get bored."

Amelia gave a little staccato shriek.

"All winter? I can't stay here all winter."

"Dear old Milly, no," said Raven, with the utmost gentleness. "I wouldn't have you for the world. It's Nan that's going to stay."

"Why," said Amelia, "it isn't decent. You're not an old man, John. Sometimes you don't even look middle-aged."

"You said I was," he reminded her. "You said I was so old I went and got cafard."

"Besides," said Amelia, clutching at her vanishing argument, "age has nothing to do with it. The older you are the more ridiculous they get over you, these romantic girls. And you'd cut in and take her away from Dick, right under his nose."

Raven suddenly tired of it.

"Amelia," he said, "don't be a fool. And don't say that sort of odious thing about Nan. I won't have it. Nan's a child."

"Oh, no," said Amelia, shaking her waved head with an air of doom. "Nan's no child. Don't make any mistake about that. She's no child."

At this, Raven found he was so unreasonably tired of her that he had to call himself to order and wonder if he really could be disgusted with Amelia, old Milly who was such a sophisticated fool and yet meant so well by everybody that you had to keep reproving yourself when you were tempted to consign her—elsewhere.

"Milly," he said, in the tone he always had toward her at her worst, a tone of recalling her, bidding her remember she was a nice ordinary woman, not an arbiter of social destinies, "Milly, sometimes you're an awful idiot. Don't you know you are? Don't you see it won't do to keep hitting me on the raw? I sha'n't stand it, you know. I shall have to take Nan under my arm and get out and leave you the house to yourself. It's all very well for you to call down alienists on me, and get me to put myself under restraint, but Nan's rather sacred to me. You can't meddle with Nan, and if you weren't so wrapped up in your own conceit, you'd see you couldn't."

Amelia seemed to be reflecting on something which resulted in shocking her into a further uneasiness.

"And the thing she said! I heard it with my own ears. She adored you! That's what she said, adored you. To Dick, too, of all people, Dick she's virtually engaged to."

Raven remembered a scene in a play where a drunken man lifts a chair and then, aware of his own possibilities, gently sets it down again. He wanted to lift a chair. Only he wanted to complete the act and smash it.

"Milly," he said gently, "I tell you Nan is a child. Doesn't that show she's a child—the pretty extravagance of it! Why, I'm 'old Rookie' to Nan. What else do you think I could possibly be?"

"Heaven knows," said Amelia, tightening her lips. "I can't imagine what her Aunt Anne would have said. John, wasn't it wonderful her leaving you practically all her money? And just what might have been expected. She was bound up in you."

"O Lord!" said Raven.

But Amelia, once started, knew no bounds.

"And that's what I say, John. If you take hold of yourself now and get into shape again, you've a great many years before you, and Anne's money with yours—well, I don't see why you shouldn't look forward to a great deal."

Raven went over to the window and sat down there staring at the black bare branches and the clear sky. It seemed to him unspeakably desolate and even, in its indifference to his own mood, cruel. So was Amelia, he thought. In spite of her platitudes about enjoying a great deal, she had him dead and buried. He became absurdly conscious that he was afraid, but of one thing only: to hear her voice again. Upon that, thinking how it would actually sound, he turned about and ignominiously left the room. And since there was no spot in the house where she might not follow him he took his hat and jacket from the kitchen and went out through the shed. Charlotte was washing dishes at the sink, but she did not, according to her custom, look up to pass the time of day. A cloud rested even on her brown hair and splendid shoulders. Amelia had brought the cloud. She'd have to get out, even if he had to tell her so.

With no intention, but an involuntary desire to be where Amelia would not find him (and also, it was possible, where that other quietest of women could be found) he went down the road to the maples, and then plunged into the woods and up the hill. He had first gone along the road to mislead Amelia, if she chanced to be looking out. He couldn't have her following, and she was equal to it, pumps and all. Halfway up the hill, making his way through undergrowth where the snow packed heavily, he turned off at his left and so got into the wood road. And then, his breath coming quick from haste and the vexation of the clogged way, he did not slacken to cool off in the relief of easier going, but, breathless as he was, began to run, and got more breathless still. Tira was up there in the hut. He was sure of it. And for those first hurried minutes he forgot her presence there meant only added misery, but dwelt upon his own need of such a spirit as hers; the strength, the poise, the ready coolness.

At the door he felt rebuffed, it looked so inhospitable, so tight against him. He tapped and waited. No one came. Then he tried it and found it locked and the revulsion was bitter. He was about turning away when it came to him that at least he might go in. The key would be under the stone. He put his hand into the hollow and found it there, and only when he was setting it in the lock realized that this meant a deeper loneliness. It would be easier to think she was there, the key turned against him, but still in his house, than to find the house itself void of her presence. He shook himself, in anger at the incomprehensible way the whole thing was moving him. Why should it move him? Then, finding it cold, the deserted room, he made himself busy and laid the fire and set the two chairs hospitably by the hearth. He did not light the fire. It must be ready for her if she came. After it was in order (her house, it seemed to him now, with a fatalism of belief he accepted and did not dwell upon) he sat down by the cold hearth and tried to think. But never of himself. He thought of her: beautiful, lustrous, caged bird with the door of her prison open, and who yet would not go. His mind went back to Milly, waiting there at home to apply scientific remedies to his diseased spirit, and he laughed a little, Milly seemed of such small consequence. But the thought of the misery of mind that had brought him here gave him a new sense of the cruelty of the world. For it had been the sad state of the whole world he had fled away from and here, as if all misery had converged to a point, he had taken a straight path to the direst tragedy of all: a mother trying against hope to save her child, the most beautiful of women pursued by sex cruelty, the gentlest threatened by brute force. How could he save her? He could not, for she would not be saved. He sat there until the dark in the corners crept toward him like fates, their mantles held up in shadowy hands, to smother him, and then suddenly remembering Nan and hospitable duties down below, he got up, chilled, went out, and locked the hut behind him. The house he found was a blaze of windows. Charlotte had lighted lamps and candles all over it. He was half amused by that, it gave such an air of fictitious gayety. He did not know Nan had whispered her to make it bright because he would see it, coming up the road.

The three were in the library by the fire. Amelia had dressed for supper in chiffon absurdly thin and curtailed, neck and hem, so that Dick had, without being told, brought her fur coat and put it about her shoulders. That was just like her, Raven thought, as he went in upon them, to go by the clock and, because winter evenings necessitated evening dress, ignore the creeping cold of a country house. Nan wore her gown of the morning, and her stout shoes. Indeed she had to, Raven reminded himself, when he was about to commend her for good taste. She had brought only her little bag. Nan was now sweet reasonableness itself. No sleepiest kitten, claws in drawn, could have been softer. Amelia was baiting her, asking her, with a reproving implication that she ought not to have been in a position to know, about the life over seas, and Nan was answering by the card, compliantly, sincerely.

She had determined, Raven could see, that there should be no more ructions in his house. When he came in, they looked up at him, frankly pleased, and Amelia as patently relieved.

"I'm so glad you've come back," she said, getting up so that Dick could set another chair, and Raven join them in the conventional family circle. "I've been trying to send Dick out after you, but he wouldn't go. John, you mustn't get into the habit of wandering off alone like that. You really mustn't."

Raven grimaced as he took the properly adjusted chair, and wondered whether he'd got again to invite Milly to shut up. But Dick did it, in an honest despair that seemed entirely adequate.

"Ain't mother the limit?" he remarked, to no one but perhaps his own wondering mind.

Raven gave a little bark of laughter, and Amelia betrayed no sign of having heard. But Raven caught the grateful tribute of Nan's tone.

"My hanky," she said, "Dickie, dear."

He saw it dropped, saw Dick dart for it, and Nan, accepting it, give his fingers a little squeeze. Evidently Dick, who flushed red, was being paid for having briefly illuminated mother. Supper was got through successfully, Raven and Dick doing active service. Raven talked about thinning out the lower woods and Dick played up beautifully, taking it with the greatest attention and answering at length. Mother was to be shunted imperceptibly from cafard. And when they had finished and returned again to the library fire, Nan, after perhaps half an hour of desultory talk, yawned rudely and asked if she might go to her bed. Raven suspected her. He noted how she half closed the library door behind her; so he took the chair she had lately left, commanding the crack of it. In about the time he expected, he heard her in the hall. She had come down the back stairs, he judged, and was now putting on her hat and coat, with scarcely a rustle, the sly one!

"Draught from this door?" he suggested, got up and closed it.

At least Dick shouldn't know she was going. If anybody stole behind her in the friendly "outdoors" it should be he, to guard her from her own foolhardiness. These roads were paths of peace, but Nan was equal to adventure more extended. She might have snatched snowshoes, in her stealthy preparation, to go off wood wandering. She might brave the darkness where, to country minds, lurked the recurring legend of the "lucivee." There was no actual danger, but Pan might be wandering.

"These old windows are draughty, too," said Raven. He paused at one of them, fumbling with the catch. Really he was watching the path. There she was, at the left, going toward her own house. He pulled down the shade and lounged back to his seat by the fire.

"You probably feel the cold," said Milly drowsily. The fur coat and blazing logs were beginning to do their blessed work. "Your vitality is low."

"Yes," said Raven piously. He would have sworn to anything. "Just so." He went on talking to Dick, and Dick caught the ball neatly, so that presently they could glance at each other in a community of understanding. "She's off!" said Raven's face, and Dick's returned, "Right you are!" while he droned on about "popple," the local word for poplar, and the right month for peeling and whether it really paid to cut it if you had to hire. Raven loved Dick at times like these, when he was neither sulky over Nan's aloofness nor didactic about democracy and free verse. Amelia choked and came awake.

"Did I," she ventured, fearing a too frank reply, "did I—make a noise?"

"No, dear," said Raven mellifluously.

If Milly had been cleverer she would have remembered that when he was deceiving her he spoke, "as if butter wouldn't melt," as if his vocal arrangements dropped oil and balm.

"Dick and I are talking out this lumber question. Don't you bother. You don't know anything about popple."

Milly, reassured, dropped her cheek, with a little breath, and closed her eyes. "Gone?" Dick telegraphed Raven, who nodded "Gone!" took a step to the door, opened it, and was himself away. He snatched, haphazard, at a hat and coat on the great chest in the hall. Dick had a way of throwing things down and leaving them where they fell. Yes, they were Dick's, and Raven hastily shoved himself into them, judging it was better, if Dick decided to go roaming, to keep him looking for them. Then he went out and down the path and along the road where Nan had gone. He came to her house and stopped, interrogating it. There was no light. Still she might be in the back part, hunting about for something she perversely couldn't wait for over night. He went up the path and tried the front door. It was fastened and he called to her. But there was no Nan, and he went back to the road and walked up and down, waiting. If she wanted a run alone in the dark, she must have it. After he had been pacing for what seemed to him a long time, he heard voices and the crunch of snow. One voice was hers, and he went on to meet it. The other, a man's, short-syllabled, replied at intervals. Nan seemed to be holding forth. They were coming on briskly, Nan and a tall figure at the other side of the road. She had seen Raven and called, clearly, though not with any implication of relief:

"That you, Rookie?"

He came up to them and saw, with a surprise out of all proportion to the event, in this neighborhood where anybody might join anybody else in familiar intercourse, that it was Tenney. They stopped, Tenney a step behind her. It looked as if he understood he had fulfilled his civility to her and could be dismissed.

"I've been calling on Mrs. Tenney," said Nan, "and I asked Mr. Tenney to walk home with me. Thank you, Mr. Tenney. Good night. Think it over, won't you?"

Tenney turned, without a word, and went back along the road, with his habitual look, Raven had time to note, in the one glance he cast after him, of being blown by a hurrying wind. Raven faced about with Nan and asked at once, in the excess of his curiosity:

"Now what are you up to, calling on the Tenneys?"

Nan answered seriously. There was trouble in her voice.

"Well, I got thinking about them so I knew I shouldn't go to sleep, and I just went up by, without any real plan, you know. The woman had such an effect on me. I couldn't keep away from her."

Raven was struck with the inevitableness of this. Yes, she had that effect. You couldn't keep away from her.

"I'd no idea of going in," said Nan. "And I did want a run. Isn't the air heady? But just as I got to the house, she opened the door. She was coming out, I suppose. She had the baby. The baby was all wrapped up. She wasn't, though. She had just an apron on her head. And when the door opened, I could hear him yelling inside. I don't know whether he was driving her out or whether she'd started to run for it."

"Well?" prompted Raven harshly. Why should she be so slow about it? "What then?"

"I went up the path," said Nan, in a half absent way, as if what she was telling seemed far less important than the perplexing issues it had bred in her. "I said good evening to her. I went by her: I think I did. I must have got into the kitchen first. And there he was. He's a striking fellow, isn't he, Rookie? Like a prophet out on the loose, foaming at the mouth and foretelling to beat the band. He'd got something in his hands. It was little and white; it might have been the baby's cap. He was tearing it to rags. You ought to have seen him at it."

"You shouldn't have gone in," said Raven angrily. "The fellow's dotty. Don't you know he is? Did he speak to you?"

Nan gave a little laugh. Suddenly the incongruity of it came over her.

"No," she said, "I spoke to him. Suddenly I seemed to see how Charlotte would have spoken—that mother way, you know, men can't stand up against. I said—I think I said—'Mr. Tenney, what under the sun are you carrying on like this for? I should think you were in liquor.'"

Raven, wondering if he should cry at the relief of having her safe out of the ogre's den, had to laugh with her.

"It caught him," said Nan, beginning to enjoy it, "as grandsir used to say, between wind and water. He looked down at the thing in his hands—the rags, you know—and dropped them into the wood-box. You see that was the real wiliness of the serpent, my telling him he was in drink. He's full of spiritual pride, all eat up with it. Then I played Charlotte some more. I told Mrs. Tenney to come in, and remarked that she'd get her death o' cold; and she did come in and her eyes—what eyes they are, Rookie!—they were big as bread and butter plates. I suspected she regarded me as specially sent. And I lit on him and told him, in good set terms, that if I knew of his driving his wife out of the house in one of his sprees, I'd have him hauled up and testify myself. Then I ordered him to get his hat and walk home with me."

"And he did!" cried Raven, in amazement at her. "Oh, yes, of course he did. Go on."

"Yes, he came to heel with a promptness that would have surprised you. And I didn't let up a minute. I discoursed all the way, on the whole duty of man."

"Did he answer?"

"Yes. That is, he spoke twice, the only times I'd let him. Once he broke in: 'I ain't a drinkin' man.' That rankled, you see."

"What did you say?"

"I said: 'Yes, you are, too. No decent man would act as you've been acting, unless he was drunk. And probably,' I said, 'you've been brewing it in the cellar, and selling it to the neighbors.'"

"That was a bliffer."

"It was. I had an idea he might drop dead in his tracks."

"That all he said?"

"Yes. Oh, no, there was one other thing. He asked me if I were saved."

"What did you say?"

"Told him not to be a fool."

Raven lifted up his voice and laughed.

They were opposite his own house, and Dick, who had just opened the front door, heard him.

"Oh," said Dick icily, when they came up to him. "So that's where you were. Uncle Jack"—for now he saw he had just cause for anger—"I'll thank you to let my hat alone."

"Yes, Dick," said Raven meekly. "But I saw it and it's such a dandy hat."

"Don't be rude to your only uncle," said Nan.

She was slipping off her coat and Raven judged, seeing her so calm, that her evening pleased her.

"Mother in there?" Raven inquired of Dick.

He had hung up the pilfered coat and hat, with great nicety of care, in the hall closet.

"No," said Dick. "She's gone to bed."

The implication was that she shouldn't have been allowed to get bored enough to go to bed.

"I'm going, too," said Nan. She gave her hand to Raven. "'Night, Rookie." Then she apparently remembered Dick, and shook her head at him. "Silly!" she commented. "Nobody'll love you if you behave like that."

Dick did not answer. He turned about and went into the library, and Raven following, after he had seen Nan at the top of the stairs, found him reading a day-old paper with a studied absorption it was evident he was far from feeling.



XVIII

Dick tossed the paper aside and turned upon Raven who, taking his chair at the hearth, had bent to throw on a handful of light wood: the sticks that wake and change a room so completely that they might almost lighten the mood of the man their burning plays upon.

"Look here," said Dick, "you put the devil into Nan. What do you do it for?"

Raven looked up at him in a complete surprise.

"No, I don't. The devil? Nan's got less to do with the devil than anybody you and I ever saw. She's kept herself unspotted. She's a child."

This last he said of sudden intent for, having noted its effect on Milly, he wondered how it would strike Dick.

"Oh, no, she isn't," said Dick, with bitterness. "Unspotted—yes, of course she is. But Nan knows her way about. She can play fast and loose with the rest of 'em."

He stopped, conscious of talking too much, and ashamed of it. Raven remembered that quick interchange of ownership and repudiation between the two as they flashed back at each other in his library, those weeks ago, but he could not tell the boy Nan had kissed him out of her impetuous bounty only because the terrors of the time had lifted her beyond habit and because Dick's need was so great. She had put the draught of life to his lips, that was all. He remembered Monna Vanna going to the sacrificial tent, and his heart melted at the thought of woman's wholesale giving even when the act is bound to recoil upon herself alone.

"You'd better not remind her of anything she said to you over there," he allowed himself to advise. "Things were pretty strenuous then, Dick, don't you remember? We've come back to a"—his voice failed him as he thought how base a time they had returned to—"a different sort of thing altogether. I'm an old fellow, according to you, but there's one thing I know. You won't get a girl by 'flying off the handle,' as Charlotte would say. Honest, old boy, when you have these fits of yours, you don't seem, according to the prophet of your generation, as impressive as usual."

"Who is the prophet of my generation?" put in Dick sourly, as if that were the issue between them.

"G. B. S., I've understood," said Raven mildly. "Don't I recall your telling me he was the greatest ever, at least since Aristophanes?"

"Oh, cut it," said Dick, whose gods were subject to change.

"Cut it by all means. But there is a thing or two I'd like your vote on. Your mother now: what's your impression of her plans about staying along here? Think she's game to tough it out as long as I do?"

"She'll stay as long as Nan does." Dick was frowning into the fire, and Raven doubted whether one of his admonitory words had sunk in. "I had an idea I could go back to town to-morrow morning and wire her I'd broken my leg or something. But Nan's got to go with me."

"Nan will do as she pleases," said Raven. He rose from his chair disgusted with young love so unpicturesque and cub-like. "Turn off the lights, will you, when you go?" And he went off to bed.

But in the morning, when he came down, Dick met him at the foot of the stairs. It was a changed Dick. His lip was trembling. Raven concerned, yet unable to deny himself a flippant inward comment, thought the boy looked as if he'd been saying his prayers.

"She's gone, Jack," said Dick.

In stress of intimacy, he often dropped the prefatory title.

"Gone?" Raven's mind flew to Tira. "Where?"

"Back to Boston. Walked to the station. Took the milk train. Charlotte says she simply walked out and said she wasn't coming back."

"Your mother or—you don't mean Nan?"

"Nan, yes. Do you see mother walking five miles to a train?" But if Dick was unsettled, this was not his surly mood of the night before. "If I drove her away"—he began, and then ended with an appealingness to be remembered of the Dick who had not been nettled by life, "Jack, I wish she wouldn't."

"I'll ask Charlotte," said Raven. "Your mother out yet? No? Well, don't bring her into it."

He went off to the kitchen where Charlotte was just setting little silver pots on a damask-covered tray. She glanced up at him, not absently, because Charlotte always seemed so charged with energy that she could turn from one task and give full attention to another.

"For Mrs. Powell," she explained, setting her hands to the tray, as if she expected him to make whatever remark he would without delaying her. "She's havin' her breakfast in bed."

"Dick tells me——" he began, and she nodded.

"Yes, she's gone. Nan, you was inquirin' about, wa'n't you? It's all right. I shouldn't ask any questions, if I was you: not yet anyways. I've got a kind of an idea Dick'll be takin' the noon back to Boston. Maybe his mother, too. But there!"

This last was as if it were too much to hope for, and she lifted the tray and hurried away with it to Old Crow's room. Raven went thoughtfully back to the hall where Dick stood waiting, gnawing at his lip, and looking curiously like the Dick who had been a boy and come to Uncle Jack to have his fortunes mended as they affected kite or ball.

"Yes," said Raven, "she's gone. Don't take it that way, old man. Nan knows what's best for her."

"Walked to the station," said Dick bitterly. "Just plain cut stick and ran. Probably carried a bag. All because I made it so sickening for her she couldn't stay."

Raven thought of the things Nan had carried in the work of the last years—supplies, babies born on retreats. She had seen the fortunes of war. But there was no need of bracing Dick by telling him he could testify she hadn't any bag. If the boy could be melted into a passion of ruth over Nan, instead of a passion of resentment, so much the better for him.

"Come and have breakfast," he said. "Charlotte's bringing it in."

They went together, and when Dick had bolted his coffee and egg he said:

"Of course I've got to take the 11.03."

"Of course," said Raven. He knew if he were a young lover who had offended Nan and driven her away, that was what he should do: follow and humble himself before her. "Jerry'll drive you down."

So it happened that when Amelia, carefully dressed, came out of her room at noon, Dick had left without a word to her and her dignified resentment was only diverted by hearing Nan, too, had gone.

"John," said she, disposing herself by the fire, "I should like to know how you account for that girl?"

"For Nan?" said Raven absently. He was wishing Nan had found it easy to tell him she was going. "I don't account for Nan. I don't have to."

"So unexpected," said Amelia. "So absolutely impervious to everything we've brought them up to reverence. It's all of a piece. Depend upon it, no young girl could go over there and do the things she did and not feel the effects of it: for life, absolutely for life. You yourself feel the effects in one way, the young ones in another."

Raven was very considerate of her, left stranded there with him. But after the noon dinner, when they settled again by the fire, he began to realize the magnitude of his task. He was simply saddled with Amelia. She hadn't been able to get her alienist up here, but she had constituted herself a psychic detective on her own account. At first he didn't mind, she was so "simple honest" in her expedients. It was amusing, to a moderate degree, to evade them. How did he sleep? Did he dream? Did he know anything about the psychology of dreams? There was Freud.

"Yes," Raven interpolated. "Nasty fellow. Peeps and botanizes on his mother's grave."

Did the world still seem to him as hopeless as it did at the time of his writing the letter? That gave him an idea.

"Where is that letter?" he asked, cutting across the track of her calculated approaches. "What became of it?"

She did not evade him. She was too surprised.

"I gave it," she owned, "to one of our doctors at home. For a medical congress."

"The devil you did!" Raven permitted himself. "Milly, sometimes I think you advanced women—O Lord!"

"What else could I do?" Milly inquired, with her deliberate fair-mindedness, which was, he miserably knew, a part of her culture. "Surely, you wouldn't suppress evidence. And it won't be traced to you. You're simply Mr. X."

Raven was silent. He was thinking what a fool he had been to unpack his heart with words, and that if he told Milly so he should simply be unpacking it some more. He looked at the clear winter day occupying itself out there without him, and wondered why the deuce he couldn't put on snowshoes and tramp off his discontent leaving her to fight her boredom by the fire. She'd brought it on herself, hadn't she? Nobody wanted her to come. Was there some hidden force in women, their apparent vulnerability to the harsh world conditions that were bound to crush out even them in the end? They seemed so weak you had, in mercy, to reenforce them and then they proved so horribly strong, and used their strength against you, depleted as you were by fighting for them. Anyway, if he could get Milly's blood to moving and pump some of this hill air into her she, too, might be a more wholesome citizen of even an unfeeling earth.

"Want to go to walk, Milly?" he suggested seductively, and she looked at him pleasantly, grateful for the tone, at least.

"No," she said, "we're so cozy here."

Cozy! it might be cozy, if that meant being choked. But he thought he could stand a little more of it, and then he would at least drop asleep and snore. The indiscretions of the body were terrible to Amelia. And he did fall into a hopeless lethargy, and only about five o'clock, when the early dark had come, threw it off and got to his feet.

"'Bye," he said. "I'll be back for supper."

Before she could answer, he was gone. Now he was afraid she might say, with an ill-timed acquiescence, that after all she would have a little walk, and he knew he simply couldn't stand it. By the fire, making an inexorable assault on his senses, the calm, steady beat of her futile talk could be borne. You bore it by listening through a dream. But out of doors, when the crisp air had waked you, you'd simply have to swear or run. He did run, snatching his hat as he went, up the road toward Tenney's. It was not a reasoned flight, but he did want to calm himself by the light burning through their windows, perhaps a glimpse of Tira moving about. The night was going to be clear and not too cold for pleasant lingering. Over beyond the rising slope opposite Nan's house he heard an owl hooting and, nearer, the barking of a fox. He turned that way and stood facing the dark slope. He knew what those trees were in spring, pink and light brown in the marshes at the foot of the rise, running up into a mist of sunshine with islands of evergreen. Then, turning to go on, he cast a glance at the house and stopped with a word of surprise. There was a light. Somebody had broken in (an incredible happening here) and was beguiled by loneliness and silence into an absurd security. He turned into the path and went softly up to the front door, lifted the latch and was stepping in when some one came. It was Nan. She was in the hall, a pile of blankets in her arms. Seeing him, she did not start, only laughed a little, all the mischief of her face running into it and waking it like the sun on moving water.

"Nan," said Raven, "Nan, my darling, why are you here?"

Nan did the incredible thing. She laid her pile of blankets in a chair, came back to him and deliberately put arms over his shoulders and about his neck. Her face, beautifully sweet in its new flush, was close to his. It might well be flushed, for he had called her darling, and Nan, feeling lorn and bewildered in losing the Rookie she used to think she knew, felt for the instant that she had got home again. She had lost him, she felt, when she saw the shaken look he gave the strange beautiful woman up in the hut. Now here he was again, quite the same, only it was true that she had not seemed to be, for years, what he called her now.

"Rookie, my darling," said Nan, seeing no reason why she shouldn't give him the precious thing back again, "I'm terrible glad you've come. Charlotte tell you?" She put her cheek against his for a minute, took her arms away and turned into the west sitting-room where a fire was leaping and making soft, living shadows on the ceiling. In the middle of the room she stopped him with a hand on his arm. "Look at the shadows," she said, in a low voice, as if they might hear and flee away. "It's exactly as if they lived here all the time and waited for us to come back to them. Look at the ones behind those candlesticks. They've always been just like this, little old scholarly gentlemen in queer hats walking along a London street. I used to think they were going to old second-hand shops to buy old second-hand books. I wouldn't have those candlesticks moved by half an inch for fear the shadows would get mad and go with them. Sit down, Rookie, there where you used to read to me. I'll light up, so we can see each other."

He did sit down without waiting for her, on the little squat, old-fashioned sofa, and Nan went about the room with her match and dotted it with candles. Raven looked after her in her housewifely progress; he was still concerned, still grave over her leaving his house for this. She had on her walking suit, whatever frills she might have discovered upstairs, and she looked ready for outdoor enterprise. What a hardy child she was, slender and supple, but taut for action in the homespun service of the day! She threw her match into the fire and came to him, sat down beside him and, like the Nan of a hundred years ago, her childhood and his youth, put her head down on his shoulder.

"Nan," said he, abandoning what he sometimes considered the heavy father attitude and jamming the silky head down into its hollow, "what did you do it for? Didn't you like my house?"

"Yes, Rookie darling," she said, in a tone of drowsy happiness. "I meant to stay—truly I did—and cut in when Mrs. Powell tried to get you to give yourself away so she could tell her alienists how crazy you are. But if I had, Dick would have stayed, too. He never'd have gone, never in the world. And he's so quarrelsome."

"How do you know he's gone?" Raven asked.

"Why, of course he has. He would, the minute he thought I had. Hasn't he?"

"Yes," said Raven, "he has. Nan, why the dickens do you treat him so? You mean to take him in the end."

"Do I?" asked Nan, still most contentedly. "Rookie, what a lot you know. Wake me if you hear a step."

"A step? Who's coming?"

"Charlotte. I told her I was no more afraid than up in your west chamber. Not so much: Dick and his mother can't pounce on me here. I didn't say that though. Charlotte thinks I just came over for a freak; but she's coming to stay with me."

"You don't know what Charlotte thinks," said Raven succinctly. "She's got a pretty accurate idea of all of us. You're not going to stay here. That's flat. We'll blow out the candles in a minute or two and poke off home."

"This is home," said Nan and rubbed her cheek on his coat. "Darling Rookie!"

"You're running away from Milly," said Raven. "That's all right. I wish I could myself. But what are you going to say when she finds the house is open and you're here? I found it out and so can she. I was going by and saw the light."

"She won't go by and see the light," said Nan, from the same far distance. "Consider those pumps. She won't go out. If she does, you must just take her the other way. Head her off, Rookie, that's what you do, head her off."

"Do you know, Nan," said Raven, with a sudden resolution, "what Dick feels about you: I mean, what makes him so sore and ugly? He told me." (There was a slight disturbance on his shoulder. Nan seemed to be shaking her head.) "He apparently can't get at you. There's something in you that baffles him, puts him off. It makes him mad as thunder. You won't let him in, Nan. You don't let him see you as you are."

"Why, Rookie!" said Nan. She sat up straight and looked him in the face. Her eyes were beautifully calm. If her clinging to him was against the rules of this present life, nothing in her expression showed it. She was really like a child used to being loved and innocently demanding it. "Why, Rookie, Dick's not more than half grown up."

"He writes," said Raven obstinately, aware of having really no argument.

"What kinds of books? Conventional rot. Verse. Anybody could do it by the yard. No, you needn't look like that. 'Course I couldn't! But anybody that could write at all. You could, Rookie, only you wouldn't have the face. You'd feel such a fool."

"Of course it's conventional," said Raven, "his poetry is. But that's natural enough. He belongs to the new school. You don't find him conventional himself, do you? Too conventional?"

"He's precisely like his mother," said Nan. She had the air of wanting to account for him, once for all, and sweep him out of the way. "Only she's conventional about waving her hair and uplift and belonging to societies, and he's conventional about brotherhood and a new world and being too broad-minded to be healthy. Don't you know there are crude things in a man that have got to stay there, if he is a man? War, now! if some beast goes out on a prowl (like Germany) the normal man doesn't call it a herd madness and quote the New Testament. He gets his gun. So did Dick get his gun, but now he thinks it's all over, he's too broad-minded to live. Oh, you can laugh, Rookie, but there is such a thing as being too superior to be decent, and that's Dick. The only time I come anywhere near liking him is when he forgets to call the world a fraternal sewing circle and comes out with a healthy damn. That's the streak of you in him. Don't you know the nicest thing about him is the streak of you?"

Raven was not aware of knowing that, but he had to own, though silently, that there was an exasperating three-quarters of Dick he himself could not, of late years, get along with. Was it youth? he wondered. Yet Nan was young. Who so sweetly sympathetic as Nan?

"Let's not talk about him," said she. "Yes, a minute more, though. I've sent off a letter to him. Charlotte was to give it to Jerry to mail on the train. It told him I shouldn't tell where I was, and I certainly shouldn't come back till he got his mother away from here. He'd simply got to do it. I told him plainly."

"And then you're going back? You promised him?"

"I didn't promise him anything. Because, how could I? I don't know how things are coming out. There's the woman."

"What woman?"

He asked this in a perfect good faith.

"Mrs. Tenney." She withdrew from him slightly. If Tira made his heart race, she wouldn't hear it. He should not be spied upon. "Don't you know," said she clearly, "I've got to see this thing through?"

"See it through?" he repeated. "You can't. She won't let you. She won't let me."

"Of course she won't let you. If the man's mad with jealousy, he won't stand another man's supporting his wife."

"I should very much doubt if she let you. She's got a loyalty—well, it's the sort you read about when a brute breaks a woman and she says she fell and hurt herself. It's been the surprise of my life that she said a word to me."

"That's easy," said Nan. "You're so awfully sorry for everybody. They feel it in you. She thought you were an archangel."

"An archangel!" groaned Raven. "Good Lord! Well, what do you propose doing?"

"Go over there to-morrow. Ask her to come here and help me get the house in order."

"Then what? Talk to her? You'll frighten her."

But he knew Nan would frighten no one, not the least of the maimed and spent.

"No, but I thought maybe if things kept happening, I could take her back with me to town, to work."

"There's the child," suggested Raven.

"Yes, that's a drawback," she owned seriously. "On the other hand, it's an advantage. The child might be made the reason: to have somebody look at him, you know. I suppose you saw he isn't quite right."

"Not right? what do you mean? Deficient?"

"I don't know," said Nan. "That or something. Deaf, maybe. But not right. I hear something. It's Charlotte. Kiss me, Rookie. On my forehead"—he did it—"on my forehead, on my right cheek, on my left cheek, on my chin. No, that's all. That's good-night, Rookie—darling Rookie! It is Charlotte. I'll let her in."

She went to the door and opened it and Charlotte appeared, done up in an old-fashioned shawl and—Raven noted in an amused incredulity—a nondescript knitted thing, old-fashioned when he was a child.

"A cloud," he said to himself. "That's what they called the thing."

He felt absurdly thankful at seeing it again. It seemed to assure him that although the surface of life might heave and sink with revolution and the fate of dynasties, Charlotte and her equipment of bed-rock integrity and clouds existed still. She paused in the doorway to take a basket from Jerry, and closed the door on him, after a casual good-night. Raven went into the hall. The basket was generous, in its oval capacity, the contents covered with a napkin.

"Want this carried upstairs?" he asked, but Charlotte shook her head.

"No," she said. "It's for her breakfast. I shall be gone 'fore light." She lifted her sincere gaze to Raven. "I thought I'd come over," she added. "I shouldn't feel easy to have her here all alone. Jerry said he wanted I should."

Raven nodded at her and carried the basket off into the kitchen, and when he came back both women were upstairs and he heard the interchange of voices and their quick tread.

"'Night, Rookie," Nan broke off her housewifely deeds to call, and he called back:

"Good night."

Then he went out and home again, and fulfilled his destiny for the day by another somnolent hour with Milly before the fire.



XIX

Nan and Charlotte, each in a front chamber, were soon cozily in warmed sheets. But when Nan judged Charlotte must be asleep, she got up, put more wood on the dying fire, slipped on her fur coat over a wrapper, did up her knees in a blanket and sat down by the window she had not yet opened, in anticipation of this hour of the silent night. Really she had lived for it, ever since she entered the hut and found the strange woman. The night at Raven's house had been as still as this, but there were invisible disturbances in the air; they riddled her chamber through and pierced her brain: what Amelia thought, what Dick thought. Here there was only the calm island of Charlotte's beneficence, and even that lay stiller than ever under the blanket of a tranquil sleep. She felt alone in a world that wasn't troubling itself about her, because it never troubled itself about anything.

The moon was just up above the fringe of trees at the east and shadows were black across the snow. She sat looking out with intentness as if she were there at the window for the sole purpose of watching the silent world, but really to get her mind in order for the next day and all the coming days. She felt about the heart the strange dropping we know as grief. No wonder the mortal creature, looking on at the commotions within the frail refuge of his body, should have evolved the age-old phrase that the heart bleeds. Nan's heart had been bleeding a long time. There used to be drops on each shock of her meeting Raven after absence and finding herself put away from the old childish state of delighted possession. At first, she had believed this was one of the mysterious cruelties of Aunt Anne's inexorable delicacy of behavior; but when she grew older she had one day a great happy light of understanding, one of those floods that sweep over youth after washing at the barriers of its innocence. Rookie himself had put her away. It was one of the scrupulous things he had done for her, because she had been too ignorant to do them for herself. He had seen she was grown-up. It was true, Nan had to own, that this was one of the lines, drawn across her life, that pleased Aunt Anne most, because it removed her (or seemed to remove her) from Rookie. Aunt Anne was jealous to her fingertips, the ends of those beautiful, delicately prisoning hands. Nan had tried never to acknowledge that. It always seemed such a barbarity to find in Aunt Anne the things that would have shocked her in herself.

To-night she looked it in the face. Aunt Anne was jealous. That was the first count. All her own life, too, Nan had been vaguely irritated by Raven's not marrying Aunt Anne. He was her property, wasn't he, in a queer way, never questioned, never, on his part, rebelled against? Yet it was a bondage. And if the real reason was that Aunt Anne wouldn't have him, why didn't he play the man and batter down her scruples, even that barrier of the years between them? But after that sudden look into Raven's eyes, the night she told him about the will, she had never been able to think of him as loving Aunt Anne at all. It was that horrible compassion of his, she believed, that obedience of the male to the weaker (and yet the stronger) principle of the demanding opposite. He had always been in bondage through his affections, first to his mother, then Aunt Anne, and then suddenly, terrifyingly, but most gloriously because this was the only wildly spontaneous thing of all, to the strange woman in the hut. He was innocent there, he was unthinking, he didn't know what tale his eyes told of him. It wasn't earthly passion they told. She had seen many things in her tumultuous life of the last few years, this woman he called a child. The eyes told how his soul was going down in a wreckage of worship of the charm that blooms in a few women only, translated to him through the pity of this woman's wretched state. Should she interpret him to himself? She could, without offending. Rookie was sensitive to see, and she found her hand steady to hold the torch. But there she saw herself slipping into Aunt Anne's mandatory attitude, choking, dominating, sapping him, heart and brain. It mustn't be done. It shouldn't. Rookie had had enough of spiritual government. Above all, she wanted him to have his life: not the sterile monotony of a man who renounced and served and deferred to managing females.

Had the woman any soul in her? If Rookie kidnaped her (and the child, it would have to be, the doubtful child) would she pay in love for love, or only an uncomprehending worship? One thing Nan had determined on, the minute she opened her door to him this night and saw the quick concern in his face and heard his tone in greeting: Rookie should feel there was somebody in this disordered world who plainly adored him. If he could believe that the better for her putting her cheek on his and loving him to death, he should have it. Rookie should feel warm. As for her, she was cold. She shivered there by the window and knew it was the inner tremor of her nerves, for the fire still leaped and the room was pulsing. "The amount of it is," said Nan to herself, "my heart's broken. Oh, hang Aunt Anne!" Then she remembered Aunt Anne was dead. But she would not have recalled the little missile hurled at the impalpable ghost through the shade of removedness that enveloped her. Nan was inexorable in standing for what she saw.

In the morning she found the fires burning below stairs and her tray set out, with cup and plate. Charlotte had gone. Nan felt the mounting of spirit due a healthy body, with the new day, and made her toast and her coffee with a great sense of the pleasure of it all. There was one drawback. It was distinctly "no fair" to let Charlotte come over to companion her at night when there was so much to do with the exigent Amelia on board. But that must settle itself. If she could get Tira (whom she also called "the woman" in her thoughts) to run away with her to town, it could hardly be done too quickly. So immediately after her breakfast she put on coat and hat and went "over to Tenney's," as the country folk would put it. This was a day brightly blue, with mounting warmth, the road a smoothness of packed snow. When she reached the house, Tenney was just driving up to the side door in the sleigh, and she rejoiced. It made her errand easier. He was going to town, and she could see the woman alone. But immediately Tira, carrying the baby, a little white lump in coat and hood, came out and stepped into the sleigh. She, too, was going. Tenney waited while she settled herself and tucked the robe about her. He was not solicitous, Nan saw, but the typical country husband, soberly according her time to get herself and the child "well fixed." Nan, waiting, her eyes on them, still halted until they drove out, and nodded her good morning. Tenney drew up. His sharp eyes signaled her.

"I've got it in mind," he announced, "to have a prayer-meetin', come Wednesday. I'm goin' to put up a notice in the post-office."

He turned a reminding look on Tira who responded by what seemed to Nan an unwilling confirmation:

"You're invited to come."

"You're all invited," said Tenney harshly, as if Tira had lagged in urgency. "All on ye."

"Thank you," said Nan, with a cheerful decisiveness. "I'll come."

Tenney slapped the reins and they went on, to a jingling of bells thinly melodious in the clear air, and Nan turned back to her house. How beautiful she was, the strange woman, she thought, with a renewal of her wonder over Tira, the calm majesty of her, the way she sat erect in the old red sleigh as if she were queen of a triumphal progress, the sad inscrutability of her wonderful eyes, the mouth with its evasive curves; how would an artist indicate them delicately enough so that you kept them in your memory as she saw herself doing, and were yet not able to say whether it was the indented corner or the full bow? She found herself remembering poetic lines about Grecian Helen, and then recalling herself to New England and the unlikelihood of such bewitchingness. There couldn't be a woman so compact of mystery and unconsidered aloofness, and yet beauty, beauty to the bone.

When the Tenneys drove by Raven's, each with face set forward, not looking at the house, Raven was in the kitchen consulting Charlotte about supplies. Jerry, also, was going to town, for, imperious even in her unspoken needs, Amelia would have to be delicately fed. Charlotte, hearing the bells, glanced absently at the window and Raven's eyes followed. He felt his heart give a little added start, of relief, he knew. At least Tenney wouldn't stop the horse and brain his wife on the road.

"There's the Tenneys," said Charlotte. "That's a queer kind of a woman, that wife he's got."

"Why is she?" Raven demanded.

Whatever Charlotte felt, he must pluck it out of her. It was sure to be true.

She spoke thoughtfully, as if reviewing what was not altogether clear in her own mind.

"I dunno's I know. But she's so kind o' quiet. Pleasant enough, but you al'ays feel as if she's a mile off."

Yes, Raven owned to himself, Charlotte was right. That was the way he felt, only it was not one mile but many miles off.

"That baby, too," said Charlotte, her brows knitted, as if the whole thing troubled her. "The baby ain't right."

Just what Nan said. What witchery women had!

"What's the matter with the baby?" he asked, and was nettled at the roughness of his voice.

Charlotte shook her head and seemed to shake off perplexed imaginings.

"I dunno," she said again. "But suthin' is. An' that's the queer part on't. You never'd know whether Mis' Tenney knows it or whether she don't. But there!" Then her mind settled to its task. "No, you couldn't git sweet-breads this time o' year, up here anyways. They don't kill."

Raven, after the consultation was over and Charlotte had explained the ease with which she could pack a hamper of hot dishes to carry over to Nan, "come one o'clock," went to his social task in the library where Amelia sat at the drowsy rite of warming her toes. He had a more or less relaxed feeling with Amelia now; she had shot her bolt and sprung her mine and could hardly have more in hiding. But she had, the completest shock possible. She sat with her eyes fixed on the doorway, waiting, and her question was ready:

"John, what do you know about Uncle John? Great-uncle, of course I mean."

Raven advanced into the room and chose a seat by the window. Amelia, still thinly clad above and ineffectually baking herself, made him irrationally want to get away from fires.

"Old Crow?" he asked.

"Why, yes, if you want to call him that. I suppose that's what the country people did call him."

"Why," said Raven slowly, getting his recollections in order, prepared to give her what was good for her and no more, "I suppose there's no doubt he was an eccentric. He built the hut up there and moved into it and finally went over the countryside doctoring, in an unscientific way—and praying—and finally hauled in Billy Jones, a sort of old rake they thought of sending to the poor farm, and took care of him till he died. Billy was a tank. When we were little, there used to be stories we got hold of about the way Billy's legs swelled. One of the boys 'down along' told me he'd been up there and looked into the hut and Billy sat there in a chair with his legs bandaged and the water dripping through to the floor. We all wished our legs would drip. We thought it was great. Mother wouldn't let me go up there after old Billy went into residence. But we boys kept on hearing about him. I've no doubt we got most of the salient points."

He was giving her more than was good for her, after all. Amelia wouldn't like this. She didn't like it.

"Shocking!" she commented, shaking her head in repudiation.

"I've thought since," said Raven, partly in musing recollection and perhaps a little to show her what she got by fishing for old memories, "Billy had cirrhosis of the liver. As I said, Billy was a tank."

"We needn't go into the question of Jones," said Amelia, with dignity. "He doesn't concern us. It was a perfectly unjustifiable thing for Uncle John to do, this taking him into his own house and nursing him. Perfectly. But it only shows how unbalanced Uncle John really was."

"Call him Old Crow, Milly," Raven interrupted her, resolved she should accept the picture as it was if she were bent on any picture at all. "Everybody knew him by that: just Old Crow. At first, I suppose it was the country way of trying to be funny over his name, as soon as he got funny to them with his queerness. And then, after he'd gone round nursing the sick and praying with the afflicted, they may have put real affection into it. You can't tell. You see, Milly, Old Crow was a practical Christian. From all I've heard, he was about the only one you and I've ever met."

"He was certainly not normal," said Amelia ingenuously, and while Raven sat rolling that over in his delighted mind and getting the full logic of it, she continued: "Do you know, John, he was a very commanding man, very handsome really? You look like him."

"Much obliged, Milly," said Raven. He was smiling broadly at her. His eyes—the crinkles about them multiplied—withdrew in a way that always made her uneasy, she was so unlikely, at such times, to guess what he was thinking about. In another instant he was to inform her. It all came over him, in a wave. He gasped under the force of it and then he roared with laughter. "By George, Milly," he cried, "I've got you. As the Scotch say (or are said to say) I hae it noo. Old Crow was dotty and my nose is like Old Crow's. So I'm dotty, too."

"I think," said Amelia, with dignity, "any specialist, if you could only be persuaded to put your case into his hands, would inquire very closely into family traits. And you and I, John, ought to help him by tabulating everything we can."

"Sure!" said Raven, relapsing into a vulgarism likely to set her teeth on edge and possibly, in the spasm of it, close them momentarily on reminiscence. "I'm willing to let you in for all I know about Old Crow. To tell the truth, I'm rather proud of him myself."

Charlotte was passing through the hall and Amelia called to her.

"Charlotte, a minute, please. You know our uncle, Mr. John Raven."

"Old Crow, Charlotte," Raven reminded her, seeing she needed prompting, not yet guessing where the question was to lead. Curiously, he thought, it was Milly's exasperating fate to put everybody on guard. But it was inevitable. When you had a meddler in the family, you never knew where you'd have to head her off.

"What," continued Amelia, "has become of Uncle John's books?"

"His books?" interrupted Raven, himself off the track now, "what the deuce do you want with Old Crow's books?"

"Where are they?" Amelia continued, now turning to him. "There's something somewhere—a book—I know it perfectly well—and we've got to have it. It came to me in the night."

"What was it?" asked Raven. "Old Crow was rather a bookish chap, I fancy, in a conventional way. I've got some of his stuff up in the hut: rather academic, the kind daguerreotyped young men with high stocks used to study by one candle. What do you suspect—a will, or a love-letter slipped in behind a cover and forgotten? It can't be a will. Old Crow didn't have anything to leave."

Amelia's hands trembled a little. A brighter rose had encircled the permanent red of her cheeks. She was, Raven saw with curiosity, much excited.

"There was certainly a book," she said, "a mottled blank book a third full of writing. It was a sort of journal. I was in the room when mother brought it from the hut and passed it to father to look at. He'd just come down from your room. You were ill, you know: diphtheria. Mother passed it to him without a word, the way people do when there are children in the room. He looked at it and then at her, and they nodded. I was little, you know, but I saw it was important, and I listened. And father said: 'No, it won't do to have it lying around. I'll carry it up attic and put it in the red chest.' That's what I mean, Charlotte," she continued, turning to Charlotte, who stood with a frown of concentration on her smooth forehead. "You know that old red chest, the one where uncle's book was put."

"Oh, yes," said Charlotte. "I know the old chest."

"Well," said Amelia conclusively, having made her point, "then you go up attic, will you, and open the chest, take out the blank book and bring it down."

"Nonsense!" said Raven. "Charlotte's got her hands full. I'll run up by and by."

Charlotte gave him a serious, perhaps a warning look, he remembered afterward, and went out of the room.

"You recall it, don't you," Amelia continued, "how you had diphtheria after Uncle John's death, and father had it next week."

"Yes," said Raven, tasting the unchanged bitterness of an old misery.

That had been one of the points where his life turned. His father had taken the infection from him and nearly died, and the child he was then had never been able to escape a shuddering belief that he might have been guilty of his father's death. That had made him turn the more passionately to the task of lightening his mother's burden in the wild anxiety he had caused her. Poor little boy, he thought, poor little fool! Making his life a business of compensating somebody for something, and never, until these later years, even seeing the visible path his own feet should have taken. He forgot Amelia and showed himself so absent that she got huffy and fell into silence and only when he left the room did she remind him:

"Don't forget the journal. You'd better run up and look for it now."

He did go upstairs, really with an idea it might be best to run over the journal before Amelia pounced on it and turned it, in some manner, to his own undoing. At the head of the stairs stood Charlotte, waiting. One hand was under her apron. She stepped silently into his room, tacitly inviting him to follow, and brought out the hand and the mottled book.

"Here," she said. "Here 'tis. You lay it away safe some'r's. Don't seem to me I'd let anybody see it, if I's you, till you've been over it yourself."

Raven, with a nod of understanding, took the book, put it into his desk drawer and turned the key, and Charlotte hurried away to her kitchen. When he went downstairs again, he found Amelia at the open door. She was all an excitement of anticipation.

"Law, Milly," said he, in the country phrasing he loved to use to her when she was most securely on her high horse of the cultured life, "you look as nervous as a witch."

"Where is it?" said Amelia, beating a tattoo of impatience, with one hand, on the door. "You've been up attic, haven't you?"

"Bless you, no," said Raven. "I can't go up attic now. I've got to do an errand for Charlotte." This was true. Nan's dinner had to be carried over. "You run up, there's a good girl. Give you something to do. No! no!" She was turning toward the kitchen. "Don't you go bothering Charlotte. I won't have it. Cut along."

And Amelia did, in a dignified haste, to show him how journals were found, and later, when the moment came, Raven went with his hot hamper to Nan's.

She met him at the door, no such overflowing Nan as last night, but serenely practical and quite settled into the accustomed comforts of her house.

"I'm as hungry as a bear," said she. "Come through to the kitchen. I eat in there. The only drawback to this, Rookie, is that it takes it out of Charlotte. Still, it won't last long, and I'll give her a kiss and a blue charmeuse. That would pay anybody for anything."

They unpacked the basket together, and Nan, her plate and knife and fork ready on a napkin, began to eat. Raven sat down at the other end of the table.

"I wish you'd stay," he said, watching her in her pretty haste. "I don't mean here: over with me. Come on, Nan. Amelia's settled down for good. She won't bother you—much. Anyhow, you can run off up to the hut."

Then he remembered what other fugitive she might find at the hut, and saw she, too, remembered. Her words came pat upon it.

"The Tenneys are going to have a prayer-meeting Wednesday night."

"A prayer-meeting!" He heard himself echoing it incredulously.

"Yes, and you're to take me, Rookie. Don't scowl. I've got to see that man when he worships his idols, and you've got to see him, too. His god must be an idol: burnt offerings, that sort of thing. Perhaps that's what he's doing it all for: offering her up, as a kind of sacrifice. His wife, I mean. What's her name, Rookie?"

"Thyatira," said Raven, and got up, his mind suddenly dense to the comfortable picture of Nan and her dinner, and went home.



XX

The next few days went by, all alike cloudless and uneventful within the house. Nan coaxed Charlotte into bringing her over meat and vegetables, and, with a plea of liking it, cooked them herself. Raven swung back and forth between the houses, but Nan found him silent and, she decided, cross. Every day he went up to the hut to see whether the fire had been lighted, and every day found the place in its chilly order. It seemed to him as if the whole tragic background against which Tira had been moving had been wiped away by some wide sweeping sponge of oblivion, as if he had dreamed the story or at least its importance in his own life, as if Nan had always been living alone in her house, and Amelia, tied up in Charlotte's aprons, her lips compressed in implacable resolution, always going through trunks in the attic, searching for a mottled book. He had no compunction over Amelia. Let her search, he thought, when Charlotte came to him with a worried brow and asked if he didn't think he could put it somewheres in sight, so's 't she should know 'twas no use. Do her good. If she didn't like it she could go back to her clubs and her eugenics and her Freudians. And when the evening of the prayer-meeting came he looked out at the brilliant weather, judged that the immediate region might seize upon it as an excuse for sleigh-riding, and was returning to his book for a brief minute more, when Amelia called from the window:

"Three sleighs! Where can they be going?"

"Oh," said Raven, without raising his eyes from the page, "sleighing, most likely."

But the minute she left the window, he put down his book, got his hat and coat from the hall, and went out through the kitchen where Charlotte was sponging bread.

"Going to the meeting?" he asked her.

"No," said Charlotte, absorbedly dissolving her yeast cake. "I never take much stock in——" There she paused, lest she might be uncharitably expansive, and found refuge in Jerry. "He says Isr'el Tenney ain't so much of a man, when all's said an' done, an' don't seem as if he could stan' seein' him on his knees. But there!"

Raven went on through the shed and up the road, to Nan's. She had seen him from the window and came down the path.

"Knew I'd come, did you?" he grumbled.

"Yes," said Nan. "We'd really better go."

Raven hated it all, out of his element as he was, going to spy on Tenney and hear him pray. What other reason was there? He and Nan simply wanted to search out the reactions in Tenney's spiritual insides in order to defeat him the more neatly.

The house was brightly lighted downstairs. Six or eight sleighs stood in the shelter of the long open shed at right angles to the barn. The horses had been taken in and blanketed. When Raven and Nan arrived, no one else was outside, and he was about to knock when Nan, who remembered the ways of neighborhood prayer-meetings, opened the door and stepped in. Men and women were seated in a couple of rows about the walls of the two front rooms, and Tenney stood in the square entry beside a table supplied with a hymn-book, a Bible, and a lamp. He had the unfamiliar aspect of a man reduced to discomfort of mind by the strictures of a Sunday suit. His eyes were burning and his mouth compressed. What did they mean, that passion of the distended pupil, that line of tightened lip? Was it the excitement of leadership, the responsibility of being "in charge" of the solemn convention of prayer-meeting? It was the face, Nan thought, of one who knew the purposes of God from the first word of creation to the last, and meant to enforce them by every mastery known to man: persuasion, rage, and cruelty. She gave him a good evening and he jerked his head slightly in response. The occasion was evidently too far out of the common to admit of ordinary greetings. A man and woman just inside the doorway of the front room moved along, and signed Raven and Nan to take their vacated seats. As soon as they were settled Tenney began to "lead in prayer," and Raven, his mind straying from the words as negligible and only likely to increase his aversion to the man, sat studying the furnishings of the room, a typical one, like all the parlors of the region from the time of his boyhood to that of his father and Old Crow. There was the center table with the album and three red volumes of Keepsakes and Garlands, a green worsted mat, hopefully designed to imitate moss, and on the depression in its center the astral lamp. On the wall opposite were pictures of Tenney's father and mother, painful enlargements from stiff photographs, and on the neighboring wall a glazed framing of wax flowers and a hair wreath. The furniture was black walnut upholstered with horsehair. Tenney was of the more prosperous line of farmers. And yet he had not begun so. All this represented the pathetic ideal of one who toiled and saved and bought after the fashion of his type.

Raven's eyes strayed to the faces about him: these were the younger set, boys and girls from sixteen to twenty. The first two or three had, by chance perhaps, dropped into this room and the rest gravitated shyly to it. There was always a line of cleavage at prayer-meeting, as at teas and "socials," between old and young. Raven was glad he had chosen the room at random. He liked the atmosphere of half-awed, half-tittering youth. They were always on the verge, always ready to find hilarity in untoward circumstance, and yet trained to a respect for meeting, doing their conventional best. What hard red cheeks there were, what great brown hands of boys, awkwardly holding hats, and yet, taken into the open, how unerringly they gripped the tasks that fell to them. All of them, boys and girls alike, were staring at him and Nan: at Nan with a frank admiration, the girls perhaps with envy. At the corner of the room corresponding to his own, two chairs had been left vacant, and when his eyes came to them he saw a blue scarf depending from the back of one; it had been dropped when the occupant of the chair had left it. It was Tira's chair, and Tira herself appeared from the door opposite, leading from the kitchen, crossed the room, took the scarf and wrapped it about her shoulders and sat down. She had been called out, perhaps in response to a cry from the child who seemed to be the center of commotion in this house, though so mysteriously inactive. Raven felt the blood mounting to his face, she was so movingly beautiful in this scene of honest but unlovely mediocrity. Even her walk across the room, unconscious of herself, yet with the rhythmic step of high processionals—how strange a part she was of this New England picture! He could not see her now, without turning, and tried to summon his mind home from her, to fix it on Tenney, who, having finished his prayer, was calling on one and another, with an unction that seemed merely a rejoicing tyranny, for testimony. It was a scene of tension. Church members were timid before the ordeal of experience or pleading, and the unconverted were strained to the verge of hysteria over a prospect of being haled into the open and prayed for. Neither Raven nor Nan knew how unpopular Tenney had become, because he could not enter the conventional limits of a prayer-meeting without turning it into something too tense, too exciting, the atmosphere of the revival. Yet, though his fellow Christians blamed him for it, they sought it like a drug. He played on their unwilling nerves and they ran to be played on. He was their opera, their jazz. Breath came faster and eyes shone. The likelihood of a hysterical giggle was imminent, and some couples, safely out of range of Tenney's gaze, were "holding hands" and mentally shuddering at their own temerity.

Now he was telling his own religious experience, with a mounting fervor ready to froth over into frenzy. Raven, turning slightly, regarded him with a cold dislike. This was the voice that had echoed through the woods that day when Tira stood, her baby in her arms, in what chill of fear Raven believed he knew. Tenney went on lashing himself into the ecstasy of his emotional debauch. His eyes glittered. He was happy, he asserted, because he had found salvation. His conversion was akin to that of Saul. To his immense spiritual egotism, Raven concluded, nothing short of a story colossally dramatic would serve. He had been a sinner, perhaps not as to works but faith. He had kept the commandments, all but one. Had he loved the Lord his God with all his heart, all his soul, all his might? No: for he had not accepted the sacrifice the Lord God had prepared for him, of His only Son. That Son of God had been with him everywhere, in his down-sittings and his uprisings, as He was with every man and woman on earth. But, like other sinful men and women, he had not seen Him. He had not felt Him. But He was there. And one day he was hoeing in the field and a voice at his side asked: "Why persecutest thou me?" He looked up and saw——Here he paused dramatically, though Raven concluded it was simply because he found himself at a loss to go on. He had appropriated the story, but he was superstitiously afraid to embroider it. For he (Raven gave him that credit) honestly believed in his self-evolved God.

"And then," said Tenney, in a broken voice, tears trickling down his cheeks, "the voice said to me: 'Go ye out and preach the gospel.'"

The front door opened and a little answering breeze flickered in the flame of the lamp. A girl near Nan, her nerves on edge, gave a cry. A man stepped in and closed the door behind him. He was a figure of fashion evolved from cheap models and flashy materials. Tall, quick in his movements, as if he found life a perpetual dance and self-consciously adapted himself to it, with mocking blue eyes, red hair and a long nose bent slightly to one side, he was, in every line and act, vulgar, and yet so arrogantly bent on pleasing that you unconsciously had to acknowledge his intention and refrain from turning your back on him. He looked at Tenney in a calculated good humor, nodded, had his great coat off with a quick gesture, and slung it over his arm. Then he stepped past Tenney, who stood petrified as if he saw the risen dead, and into the room. This was Eugene Martin. He seemed not to be in the least subdued to the accepted rules of prayer-meeting, but nodded and smiled impartially, and, as if he had flashed that look about for the one niche waiting for him, stepped lightly over to Tira's corner and took the chair at her side. Raven, from the tragic change in Tenney's face, knew who he was and bent forward to see what Tira's eyes would tell. She was, it seemed, frozen into endurance. Martin, in seating himself, had given her a cordial good evening. She did not answer, nor did she look at him. Her pale lips did not move. Nor did she, on the other hand, withdraw from him. The chairs had been pushed close, and, as she sat upright, scarcely moving a muscle with her breath, the blue scarf touched his shoulder. Raven withdrew his gaze, not to make the moment in any sense conspicuous, and, feeling the silence, turned to Tenney to see if his leadership could surmount this base assault. The assault was premeditated. The gay insolence of the man's manner told him that. Tenney stood there silent, flaccid, a hand on the casing of the door. Every vestige of religious excitement had left his face. His overthrow was complete, and Raven, judging how Martin must rejoice, was for the moment almost as sorry for Tenney as for his wife. The little disturbance had lasted only a moment, but now all eyes were turning on Tenney, who had ceased to "lead." In another minute the eyes would be curious, the silence would be felt. As Raven wondered what would break the evil spell, Nan's voice came out clear, untinged by the prevailing somberness, warm with the confidence of youth: