OLD CROW

BY ALICE BROWN

New York
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1922

All rights reserved

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.

Copyright, 1922,
By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.

Set up and electrotyped. Published October, 1922.

CONTENTS

[I]
[II]
[III]
[IV]
[V]
[VI]
[VII]
[VIII]
[IX]
[X]
[XI]
[XII]
[XIII]
[XIV]
[XV]
[XVI]
[XVII]
[XVIII]
[XIX]
[XX]
[XXI]
[XXII]
[XXIII]
[XXIV]
[XXV]
[XXVI]
[XXVII]
[XXVIII]
[XXIX]
[XXX]
[XXXI]
[XXXII]
[XXXIII]
[XXXIV]
[XXXV]
[XXXVI]
[XXXVII]
[XXXVIII]
[XXXIX]
[XL]
[XLI]
[XLII]
[XLIII]
[XLIV]
[XLV]
[XLVI]

OLD CROW

I

John Raven sat in the library of his shabby, yet dignified Boston house, waiting for Richard Powell, his nephew, whom he had summoned for an intimate talk. He was sitting by the fire making a pretense of reading the evening paper, but really he was prefiguring the coming interview, dreading it a good deal, and chiefly for the reason that there was an argument to be presented, and for this he was insufficiently prepared, and must be, however long it might be delayed. When he telephoned Dick to come he was at last armed with a bold conviction of being able to proffer a certain case to him (his own case, in fact); but, as these last moments went on, he weakened sensibly in any hope he might have had that Dick would be able to meet him from any illuminating viewpoint of his own. This was mid-winter, two years after the end of the War, where Dick and his uncle had worked in the Ambulance Corps to the limit of their capacities—Dick, no soldier, because of what seemed to him a diabolic eccentricity of imperfect sight, and Raven, blocked by what he felt to be the negligible disability of age. John Raven had, with the beginning of the War—which, as early as 1914 he had decided to be his war—made up his mind that although he was over forty and of a business training with inconsiderable excursions into literature, he wanted nothing so much as to get into the thick of it and the rough of it, so far as a man might who was past his physical best, and now he was back again, more fit than when he went, but at this present moment breathless at the realization that he had been up against life as it actually is, and that he found it a brute business and hated it. And this was not so much the horror of life in the field where, however the human heart cried out against the argument of desecrated flesh, the spirit could call mightily upon God, challenging Him to grant the chrism of fulfilment in return for this wild sacrifice of blood, as the horror of life when peace was exercising her rights in unbelievable ways. This he was going to explain to Dick, if he could manage it, while he set forth also his need of retreating from the active scene and leaving some of his formerly accepted duties on Dick's shoulders. As he sat there, gaunt, long, lean man, with a thin brown face and the eagle's look, a fineness of aquiline curve that made him significant in a dominant type, he fitted his room as the room fitted him. The house was old; nothing had been changed in it since the year when, in his first-won prosperity, he persuaded his mother up from the country and let her furnish it with her shyly modest taste, a sense of values that bade her keep within the boundary of the atmosphere she brought with her in good old pieces tenderly used. The room was dim, even by day, from these shadows of the brooding past, and the dull blue draperies at the windows, while they touched it to a more inspiriting tone, still spoke softly of the repose a man wanted when he escaped from the outer world to the assuagement of silence and his books.

To-night, when Raven had just about come to the conclusion that he could not possibly enter upon certain things with Dick because, although Dick elected to be a poet, there was no recognized form of words that would make him understand, and he'd better telephone him to put the interview off, he heard his voice in the hall, and, answering it, even breaking over it, like bright bubbles of a vocal stream, the voice of the girl they both loved, in ways becoming to their differences. Raven drew a comfortable breath. The intimate conference with Dick would have to be deferred, though he would quite as willingly have had Nan listen to it, except for the chance of her carrying it away with her, in that sympathetic tenderness of hers, to burden her young heart. Nan would have made quick work of understanding. She translated you as you went, and even ran ahead of you, in her haste, just as she sometimes cut in on your speech, not rudely rebuking you for being too slow, but in her eagerness to assure you she caught at the first toss. And then they came in, she full of anticipatory delight at seeing Raven, and Dick so full of her that he seemed not to know whether his uncle were there or not, except as an habitual figure in the furnishing of the room.

We must pause a dull minute, while they were projecting themselves into the scene, to find out how they looked and whether they also fitted the room and Raven. Nan, known to her larger world as Annette Hamilton, was a tall, slim, yet muscular girl, graced with as many physical contradictions as you are likely to imagine. While she stood for an instant before, puppy-like, precipitating herself upon Raven, her eyes crinkled up like Mary Seraskier's, and she showed a line of milk-white teeth. Altogether nature—for she had only the most inconsiderable help from art—had done her exceedingly well. She had the hurling impetuosities of the puppy when she found herself anywhere near persons familiarly dear to her; but, unlike the puppy, she was a thing of grace. Her hands and slim arms had a girl's loveliest contours, and yet, hidden somewhere under that satin flesh with its rose and silver lustre, were muscles serviceably strong. Her eyes were grey like Athena's, her hair fine and thick and pale, and her face altogether too irregular to talk about reasonably.

How is it possible to delineate Dick, even with all profuse generosity of comment, without suggesting that he was not of the type to please himself, or tagging him with a priggishness afar from him? He certainly was not the sort of hero his dramatic poems described with a choppy vigor of detail, and whom there is no doubt he would have chosen to resemble. But nature had given him a slimness and an actual grace he found, in his private self-scrutiny, almost girlish, nor could he wholly outwit and supplement her by the athletic training he never intermitted. Dick's face, too, he found much against him, being of a round solidity with a nose too thick and a mouth a thought too small. How could such despite have happened to him, he asked himself in moments of depression when, confronting the mirror, he recognized the wrongs inheritance had done him. But he knew. It was father's people, that was it. They were all round and owlish, and they thickened up in middle life. If he could have shared Uncle Jack's lean aquilinity, people would have looked at him twice, as they did at Uncle Jack, which in itself would be a bore, except that Nan also might look. Aware of these things and hiding them in his soul, he held himself tight, shut his mouth close, and challenged you with a spectacled eye, pinning you down as if to say: "I am born in every particular as I didn't want to be, but take notice that I'll have no light recognition of the hateful trick they did me. I am in training for a husky fellow. I haven't let up on myself one instant since I found out how horrible it was to be a good deal more of a fellow than I shall ever look. I never shall let up. And don't you let me catch you letting up either, in the way you treat me."

Nan, to go back to the minute of their entrance, made a swift assault upon Raven. In the old days when he was a youngish man and she a little girl, a growing thing, elongating like Alice, she used to hurl herself into his arms and insist on staying there. Her aunt, Miss Anne Hamilton, who had brought her up from babyhood, was always detaching her from Raven; but Nan clung as persistently. Raven would look at Miss Anne, over the girl's rumpled silk poll, with whimsically imploring eyes. Why couldn't Nan be allowed to break upon him like a salty, fragrant wave of the sea, he seemed to ask Miss Anne, bringing all sorts of floating richness, the outcrop of her fancies and affections? Aunt Anne would return the glance with her sweet, immovable deprecation and go on detaching, while Nan, with an equal obstinacy—though hers was protesting, vocable, sometimes shrill to the point of anguish—stuck to her self-assumed rights. It was Raven himself who involuntarily stepped over to Aunt Anne's side and finished the detaching process. When Nan came back after her first term at the seminary Aunt Anne preferred to college, and was running to him with her challenge of welcome, he was taken aback by the nymph-like grace and beauty of her, the poise of the small head with its braided crown—the girls at the seminary told her she might have been a Victorian by the way she wore her hair—and he instinctively caught her arms, about to enwreath his neck, held her still and looked at her. She could not know what vision, overwhelming in its suddenness, she brought before him, of childhood gone and maidenhood come and the sacredness of this new state. Aunt Anne knew and frowned a little to herself, from her silent, savage jealousy, realizing, though she would never, in her proud integrity, allow herself to think it, that this hushed veneration of Raven's was worse than the old tumultuous intercourse. What Raven really might have said was:

"Darling, you're a woman and you're a beauty. You don't know it, but you don't want to hug a jaded old reveler like me."

He was not, by any means, a reveler. His life had been little more than a series of walks to business. But those were the words that came to him, catching her adorable freshness of body and mind, and determining to keep it untouched by dusty old pantaloons such as he saw himself. Nan stood for a minute paling out under his eyes, and then drew away from him and left the room, her braid-crowned head high. She had to meet him at dinner, and he knew she had cried and Aunt Anne knew it and was hard on her over the little things she could reprove her for, in a silky, affectionate way, and Raven's heart swelled until he thought they both must know its congestion, and tried to put round it another bond of quiet, kind affection. Since that time, Nan had never kissed him; but now, this two months since the death of Aunt Anne, she had adopted a greeting of her own. She put her hands on his arm and bent her forehead for a minute to his shoulder. The first time she did it, he wanted to kiss the bright hair, but forbade himself, and the second time he said, he was so curious over it:

"A rite?"

She was ready with her answer. He suspected she must have thought it out ingeniously beforehand.

"It's because I'm sorry for you."

"Sorry?" he repeated.

"Yes," she said, "about Aunt Anne."

Then he realized she was sorry because Aunt Anne was dead, and he was more and more conscious of the unbecoming lightness and freedom where he found himself at the death of Aunt Anne. He had not dared acknowledge it to himself. He couldn't, for shame. But whereas, in the past years, when he ventured to formulate his own life a little and see what it had done to him and how he could go on meeting it, he had had a sense of harassment and of being driven too hard, after Aunt Anne's death he began to recognize the stillness of the space she had left behind. Now to-day, before Nan had accomplished the little rite of the bowed head on his shoulder, something queer about it seemed to strike Dick, and he said to her:

"He's your uncle, too, you know."

Raven took this with composure, as signifying the length as well as the depth of his adoptive relation toward her, but Nan met it with resentment. She left him and turned upon Dick.

"Now what," she said, "do you mean by that?"

"Why, Nan," said the poor youth, keeping a stiff upper lip, because he recognized the signs of an approaching squabble, "I've told him. I'll tell him again. Jack, we're engaged."

"We're nothing of the sort," said Nan, either in pure surprise or an excellent simulation of it.

Dick met this doggedly.

"We are, too," he said. "You promised me."

"Maybe I did," Nan yielded. "But it was that awful night when you were going out. We won't talk about that. I'd have promised you anything then. I'd have promised anybody, just as I'd have given 'em coffee or a smoke. But when we got back and you expected to begin from there, didn't I tell you to shut up? I've told you to ever since. And I believe," she added, with an acumen that struck him in the center, "you're only dragging it out now to catch me—before him."

"I did shut up," said Dick, holding himself straight and using his mouth tautly, "because your aunt was sick and then because she was worse. But you needn't think I've shut up for good. Besides, it's only Jack I told. He's nobody."

"No," said Raven mildly, "I'm nobody. Only I wish you wouldn't come here to fight. Why can't you get it over on the steps, and then act like Christians after you come in?"

Nan laughed. She was instantly and most obligingly sweet, as if wholly bent on pleasing him. But Richard glowered. It was quite like her, he thought, to sprinkle herself over with that May morning look of hers when she knew she had the horrible advantage not only of being adorable in herself, but a female to boot, within all the sanctities that still do hedge the sex, however it behaves.

"You see," said Nan maternally, "in France we were living at high pressure. Now everything's different. We mustn't be silly. Run away, Dick, just as I told you, and leave me to talk to Rookie."

This was her name for Raven, saved over from childish days.

"All right then," said Dick. "But I sha'n't wait for you. I shall go to Cambridge."

It was such an anticlimax of a threat, delivered in so determined a voice, that he expected them to laugh, in a silly way they had of seeing the merest foolishness always from the same angle. But, as he turned to go, it was with the chill certainty that they had forgotten all about him. Nan had settled herself by the fire and his uncle was bringing her a footstool, an elderly attention, Dick floutingly thought, very well suited to Aunt Anne, but pure silliness for a girl who flung herself about all over the place. At any rate, he wasn't wanted, and he did go to Cambridge and hunted up some of the fellows likely to talk sense; but no sooner had he settled within their circle of geniality than he found himself glooming over Nan and tempted to go back and break in on that mysterious conclave.

It was mysterious. Nan herself had made it so. Her face, on Dick's going, had fallen into a grave repose, and she turned at once to Raven, saying:

"You see, Dick ran in on the way over here, and when he told me you'd sent for him, I said I'd come along, because I'd got to see you instead. Was that cheeky? I really have got to. Couldn't the other thing wait?"

"Perfectly well," said Raven, with a ready cheerfulness he was aware she could not understand. How should she? He had not been in the habit of troubling Dick, or indeed any one, with his vaporings. He had lived, of late years, as a sedate, middle-aged gentleman should, with no implication of finding the world any less roseate than his hopes had promised. As to Dick, the very sight of him had shown him beyond a doubt how little disposed he was to take the lad into that area of tumultuous discontent which was now his mind. "Fire away," he bade her. "You in trouble, dear? You want patriarchal advice?"

Nan might not have heard. She was looking, with a frowning gravity, into the fire. How should she begin? He saw the question beating about in her mind and hoped he could give her a lead. But she found the way for herself. She turned to him with a sudden lovely smile.

"Aunt Anne," she said, "has done something beautiful."

He felt his heart shrinking within him as he combated the ungracious feeling which, it seemed, would not down: that he was never to be done with Aunt Anne's deeds, so often demanding, as they did, a reciprocal action from him. What he wanted, he realized grimly, was to have his cake and eat it, if he might use so homespun a simile for a woman who had persistently lived for him and in him and then had made clear spaces about him by going away in the dignity of death. He wanted to breathe in the space she had left, and he also wanted to be spared the indecency of recognizing his relief. But Nan, studying the fire persistently, to allow his eyes all possible liberty of searching her face while she generously avoided his, was going on in what was evidently a preconceived task of breaking something to him.

"Yes, she's done something beautiful, and done it for you."

Raven's heart had shrunk so now that he wondered it could weigh so heavily. How could a woman, his rebellious intelligence asked him, manage to pursue a man with her benefits even from the grave? All his grown-up life he had fought them, but still they hung about him him like shackles. When he tore them off from one member—always wounding himself only, and scrupulously sure of never, except by the inevitability of his refusals, hurting her—they fastened on him somewhere else. When he was under twenty—for he was fourteen years younger than she—had come the question of her endowing him for the period of his apprenticeship to literature, that he might write with a free mind. He had, tempting as that was and safe as it seemed to his arrogant youth, found the decency and prudence to refuse. He wondered now how he had been spared, saved really by the prophetic gods from taking that guarantee, though he was then so sure of his ability to justify the risk and pay it all back. Perhaps his mother had helped him. She was a woman of rare sanity, and though he could not remember her uttering a dissuading word, he was sure, in the light of his own middle-aged vision, that she must have been throwing the weight of her clear-mindedness into the scale.

Then there was the question of a college course and of European travel: those were among the colossal gifts Anne Hamilton had sought to lavish on him. But again he had saved himself, accepting one thing only, a benefit that must have hurt her heart like a stone, she was so bent on his beautiful, bright aptitude at writing taking its place as soon as possible, and with no dimming from a prosaic drudgery, in the world as she knew it: the Boston world, the New England world, the court of judgment that sits across the Atlantic. This benefit he asked for and received, from her father: a clerk's place in the mills—Hamilton was a wool magnate—and a chance to earn steady money for himself and his mother, who was every year, in spite of her stout heart, slipping into the weakness of the chronic invalid. Raven wrote his books at the fag end of days given to his dull industry, and he succeeded in calling attention to himself as a classical scholar, and then, as he impatiently hit out with what he called pot-boilers in dialect, he got a popular hearing and more money as well. All the time he was advancing in the mills, and, as he advanced, he never failed to see before him the flutter of Anne's discreet draperies or hear the click of her determined heel. She never appeared in the business at all, but he was perfectly sure there wasn't a preferment offered him by her father for which he wasn't indebted to her manipulation of Hamilton in long, skillful hours beforehand. Hamilton had no slightest idea he was being influenced, but, as the years went on, he grew in appreciation of young Raven's business abilities to such a degree that John, reading his mind like a familiar tongue, wondered whether after all it was true, and he hadn't a genius for the affairs of wool. Was he doing the thing that seemed so dull to him with such mechanical and yet consummate cleverness that he was worth all this unripe advancement, or was it indeed Anne's white hand that was turning the wheel of power, her wand that was keeping the augmented vision of him ever before her father's credulous eyes? But he could not retard the wheels of his progress without making a fool of himself, and by the time his sister had prosperously married and his mother had died, he was a partner in the business, and then Hamilton also died and Raven was asking Dick, hoping all the time he would refuse, if he wanted to come in. Dick did refuse, with an instant hearty decision for which his uncle inwardly blessed him. Raven had got so restive by this time over the position he had himself won through Anne's generalship that he felt the curse was going down through the family, and that Dick, if he should come in, would wake up at forty-odd and find himself under the too heavy shade of the Hamilton benevolence.

"Not on your life," said Dick, when he was halfheartedly offered the chance of battening on wool, "not while Mum's got the dough. There's only one of me, and she's bound to keep me going."

"You couldn't marry on it," said Raven.

For that also Dick was cheerfully prepared.

"By the time Nan's ready," he said, having at that point asked her intermittently for several years, "I shall be getting barrelfuls out of my plays."

"'If,'" quoted Raven, "'Medina Sidonia had waited for the skin of the bear that was not yet killed, he might have catched a great cold.'"

"That's all right," said Dick. "You needn't worry, not till it begins to worry me. The only thing that gets me is not pinning Nan down."

"Yes," said Raven, "she's a difficult person to pin."

And saying it, he had a vision of a bright butterfly with "dye-dusty wings" in stiff, glass-covered brittleness. He wondered if marrying might pin Nan down like that.

Another thought troubled him a little: whether Dick had built even obscurely in his own mind on the money Nan would have from Aunt Anne, and the more modest sum she had now from her dead father and mother. He concluded not. He hadn't got to worry about that. Dick had lived in the atmosphere of money and he took its permanence for granted.

But we are keeping Nan looking at the fire and trying to get her news out adequately, waiting a long time for these explanatory excursions into past history. Raven also was waiting, a good deal excited and conscious of his apprehensive heart. And when she spoke, in a studied quietude, he found the words were the very last he expected to hear:

"I wanted to be the one to tell you. We've found her will."

II

They sat there silent for several minutes. Raven was keeping desperate clutch on the inner self lashed by his hurrying heart, and telling it there was no danger of his saying any of the things it was hounding him on to say. He wanted to break out with an untempered violence:

"Of course you've found it. And of course she's left a lot of it to me."

He did not really believe that: only it so linked up with the chain of her unceasing benevolences toward him that it seemed the only thing to complete them adequately. And Nan, as if his premonition had prompted her, too, was saying, after the minute she had left him to get his pace even with hers, as if to assure him that, although she knew so much more than he, she wouldn't hurry ahead:

"Rookie, dear, she's left it all to you."

Raven felt himself tighten up, every nerve and sinew of him, to do something before it should be too late. He bent forward to her and said, a sharp query:

"Who found it?"

"Why," said Nan, smiling as if she couldn't ask anything better, "I found it, in a perfectly innocent looking envelope with some old deeds and mortgages."

"You haven't got it here, have you?" he pelted on. "You didn't bring it with you?"

His eyes interrogated her with his voice, and she shook her head, wondering at him.

"Nothing to you?" he asked sharply. "I'm the sole legatee?"

"Oh, I have the house, of course," said Nan, "the one here and the place at Wake Hill. She had those only for her lifetime, you know. Yes, you're the sole legatee."

"You haven't told anybody, have you?" he asked, in a despairing haste, as if he were seeking about for ways to suppress the document.

She broke into an amused giggle, the note he sometimes fancied she kept for him alone.

"Why, yes," she said, "of course I have. I telephoned Mr. Whitney, and he was in a great state over it. He came round, and I gave it to him."

"A lawyer!" said Raven, in disgust. "A damned accurate, precedent-preaching lawyer! Well, the fat's in the fire now. What did you have to be so confounded previous for?"

Nan was smiling at him as if she found herself wiser than he.

"You didn't think you could tear it up, did you, Rookie?" she inquired. "You can't, you know, except in stories."

"I don't know what I thought," he said. "Only I wish it hadn't been done, that's all. It's a"—he ended blankly—"a mistake."

She was looking at him now in a warm, sweet way, to tell him she understood and thanked him.

"You're afraid I sha'n't have enough," she said. "I shall. I'd ever so much rather you had it, Rookie."

"It isn't a question," said Raven curtly, in his disaffection, "of how much you're worth. It's simply yours, that's all, and you've got to have it. Well, I can refuse it, I suppose. Only that's so boorish. It drags everybody out into the open. What made her! Oh, what made her!"

"I think it's nice," said Nan comfortably. "It seems to make everything so right. As to other people—why, it's telling them, don't you know, you really were the one she cared most about, though she couldn't care quite in the way you wanted her to."

He sat staring at her. What did she mean? What had she made up, in her adequate mind, about his relation to Aunt Anne? She couldn't know how he had fought off the yearly increasing benefits Anne had showered him with, unless indeed Anne had told her. And it wasn't like her. Anne was dignity itself. She kept her own counsel. She took her stately course without the least recognition that there were peculiarities in the pace she kept or the road she chose. She had the unconscious arrogance of her class, a class perhaps, except as surviving in individuals, almost extinct. She never accounted for herself, because it could not have forced its way into her mind, from birth to death, that there was anything in her conduct save the inevitable best, as ordered as the stars. So, Raven knew, she had probably never talked over his nebulous relation with her to Nan; but he was suddenly alive with curiosity to know. He couldn't coax Nan into betraying that confidence, but he was nevertheless set on getting at it somehow. He wondered if it might be decent to do it by direct attack.

"Nan," said he, "just what was my relation to your Aunt Anne? What do you assume it to have been?"

She looked at him as if in reproach, a hurt pride flushing her cheek and giving a sort of wounded appeal to her glance.

"Why," she stumbled, "I know. Of course I know. Everybody did that heard how long you'd been devoted to her."

This gave him so sharp a pang that it might almost have seemed she had been told off to avenge some of Aunt Anne's wrongs of omission suffered at his hands. He had never been devoted to her, even with his decent show of deference in return for the benefits he had to reject. And now Nan was accusing him of having kept up the relation he had been all his life repudiating, and since Aunt Anne was gone (in the pathetic immunity that shuts the lips of the living as it does those of the dead), he could not repudiate it any more. Nan was looking at him now in her clear-eyed gravity, but still with that unconscious implication of there being something in it all to hurt her personally. The words came as if in spite of her, so impetuously that she might easily not have seen how significant they were:

"There's nothing to be ashamed of in not getting the woman you want, especially with that reason. She adored you, Rookie. I know she did. And it was pretty heroic in her to keep her mind fixed on all those years between you. I wouldn't, I can tell you. Do you s'pose I'd let a matter of fourteen years keep me from the only man? No, sir. Not me."

They sat gazing at each other, she as self-willed as her words and he abjectly afraid of her finding out. Why? He could not have told. But it did seem as if he must protect Anne, in the shadows where she lived now, from the flashing directness of this terrible young glance. It was all he could do for her. It was bad enough to have Nan build up a beautiful dream house of eternal love and renunciation. It was infinitely worse to be the cause of her demolishing it. And as his eyes, in sheer terror of leaving her to reflect any more astutely and productively on this, held hers, and hers answered back, suddenly he saw a new knowledge dawn in their clear depths. She had somehow read him, underneath his evasions. She knew. And before she could turn that involuntary discovery of hers over in her mind and blur it with some of the discretions he was trying to maintain, she burst out, in the extremity of her wonder:

"Good heavens! I don't believe it was so at all. You weren't in love with her. She was with you, and that was the only way she——" Here she saw the morass her crude candor was leading them both into, and stopped, but not soon enough for him to miss the look of eager relief sprung into her eyes. He turned from her and spoke roughly:

"We don't know what we're talking about. Going into things now—why, it's the merest folly. Haven't we enough to worry over in the matter of the will? That's the thing we've got to meet next."

She had now, he saw, the consciously sweet and warming smile she had for him when she wanted to coax him into doing something or ignoring something she had done.

"I'm in hopes," she said, "you may feel differently after you've read her letter."

"Her letter?" he repeated, as if that were a superadded shock. "What letter?"

"It was in the envelope," said Nan soothingly, "with the will."

"Who's it to?"

He was a writer of English, but his extremity was such that only the briefest slovenliness would serve.

"To you," she said, unclasping her little bag and bringing it out, the familiar superscription uppermost and the very size and texture of the envelope so reminiscent of Anne's unchanging habits that he felt again the pressure of her fine indomitable hand on his.

"Have you," he asked bleakly, "shown that to Whitney?"

"Why, no," said she, in a clear-eyed surprise. "Of course not. It's addressed to you."

She held it out to him and, after a perceptible pause, he took it from her and sat holding it, looking over it into the fire, as if he saw his fate there, or as if he should determine it for himself by tossing the letter in, to be devoured. Then he became aware that Nan was gathering herself up to go. It was rather a mental intimation than anything tangible. She was tight furled, like all the women of that moment of fashion, and had no flying draperies to collect. But he felt her flitting and knew at the same instant that he could not lose her, since, determined as he was to bar her out of the inner recesses of his unfurnished mental prison, where he and the memory of Aunt Anne dwelt so miserably together, it was still a comfort to keep her human presence within call.

"Don't go," he implored her, and she, surprised, settled back, saying:

"No, of course not, if you don't want me to. I thought you'd like to read it straight off. Wouldn't it be easier to read it alone?"

"I don't know whether I can ever read it," said Raven, and then, seeing what a great booby he must sound, he ended savagely: "I'll read it now."

Nan took a paper-knife from the table and offered it to him. Evidently she felt an unformulated tenderness there, a guess that if he tore it open it would seem as if he were somehow tearing at Aunt Anne's vanished and helpless delicacies. Then, as he did not accept the knife, or, indeed, seem to see it, she took the letter from his hand, ran the blade noiselessly under the flap, withdrew the folded sheets, and gave them to him. Raven, with a little shake of the head, as if he were reminding himself not to be a fool, opened the letter, fixed his attention on it and, without looking up, hurried through the closely written pages. Nan sat as still as an image of silence, and when he had done and she heard him folding the sheets and putting them back into the envelope, she did not look up.

"Well," said he, his voice so harsh and dry that now she did glance at him in a quick inquiry, "it's as bad as it can be. No, it couldn't very well be worse."

Harrying thoughts raced through her mind. Had Aunt Anne reproached him for any friendliness unreturned, any old hurt time had never healed? No, Aunt Anne was too effectually armored by an exquisite propriety. She would have been too proud to make any egotistical demand for herself during life. Assuredly she could not have done it after death. Raven may have guessed what she was thinking.

"No," he said, in the same tone of dry distaste. All at once it seemed he could be definitely allowed to treat himself to a little wholesome rebuttal of Anne and her ways. "It's nothing you could possibly imagine. She leaves the money to me to be used for a certain purpose. She doesn't leave it to any association of the people that think as she does, because she doesn't absolutely trust them never to divert it into some channel she wouldn't approve. She leaves it to me to administer because I know precisely what she means and I'd feel bound to do it in her way and no other."

"But what is the purpose?" Nan asked him. She was thoroughly surprised and very curious. "So it's for a cause. Aren't you glad, Rookie? A minute ago you didn't want it. What is the cause?"

"The cause," said Raven, with infinite distaste, as if it galled him even to say it, "is the cause of Peace."

"Good Lord!" said Nan breathlessly. "O my stars!" She thought of it a moment, and he thought also, and then she gathered herself hopefully. "But, Rookie dear, you believe in peace. You don't have to carry it out in her way. You can carry it out in yours—and mine—and Dick's—we that have seen things over there. Why, bless you, Rookie, it's a great idea. It's a chance: Liberty enlightening the world! a big educational fund, and you to administer it. Cheer up, Rookie dear. It's a chance."

"Oh, no, it's not a chance," said Raven bitterly. "She's seen to that. She's tied me up, hand and foot. It's got to be done in her way, the way she'd been doing it herself since 1914."

"The acutely sentimental?" asked Nan ruthlessly. Then the misery of his face—a look, too, of mortification as if somebody had put him to public shame—hurt her so that she spoke with an impetuous bitterness of her own: "It was a cruel thing to do. Well, it was like her."

Raven put in heavily:

"She never meant to be cruel."

"No," said Nan, "but the whole thing—all the things she had to do with—came out of her being absolutely stupid and absolutely sure she was right."

Raven thought apathetically for a moment. His mind went plodding back over the years of his acquaintance with Anne, as he had never meant it should again. There had been moments, of late, when he wondered if he need ever go back to that guiding hand of hers on his unresponsive life. Of herself, he would have protested, he must have the decency to think. Just now, recurring to that also, he wondered, with a grim amusement, whether he had perhaps meant to set apart a day for it, say Thursdays from ten to twelve, to think gratefully of Anne. But here he was again at war with her, and the curious part of it seemed to be that he couldn't undertake the warfare with the old, steady, hopeless persistence he had got used to in their past; the mere thought of it had roused him to a certain alarming wildness of revolt.

"Well," he found himself saying to Nan, because there might be a propriety in curbing her impetuous conclusions, "she had a way of being right—conventionally, you might say."

"Was she right about the War?" Nan threw back at him.

"No," he felt obliged to own.

"Is she right about this, trying to fetter you, hand and foot, against what she knew you believed, and banking on your doing it because she's crowded you and rushed you so many times and you've never failed her?"

"Oh, yes," said Raven miserably, "I've failed her often enough."

"But answer me that: was she right when she left you her money to do this fool thing and give the world another kick down hill where the sentimentalists are sending it? Now I ask you, Rookie, was she right?"

"No," he owned again.

"Then," said Nan triumphantly, "you mean she's right about teas and dinners and women's clubs and old portraits and genealogy and believing our family tree was the tree of life. That's what you mean, isn't it, Rookie?"

Raven looked at her, an unhappy smile dawning. He was moderately sure, in his unspoken certainties, that this was what he did mean. She had been the perfect product of a certain form of civilization, her proprieties, her cruelties even—though, so civilized were they, they seemed to rank only as spiritual necessities.

"I'd rather see a monkey climbing our family tree," said Nan, with a rash irrelevance she hoped might shock him into the reaction of a wholesome disapproval, "than all those stiffs she used to hold up for me to imitate."

"Don't!" said Raven involuntarily. "It would hurt her like the mischief to hear you say a thing like that."

"Why, Rookie," said Nan, with a tenderness for him alone, he saw, not for Aunt Anne, "you act as if she might be—in the room." She kept a merciful restraint on herself there. She had almost said: "You act as if you were afraid she might be in the room."

He sat staring at her from under frowning brows. Was it possible, his startled consciousness asked itself, that the spell of Anne's tenacity of will had not lifted in the least and he did think she might be in the room? Not to intimidate him: he had never feared her. He had been under the yoke, not only of his decent gratitude, but his knowledge of the frightful hurts he could deal her. He wondered what Nan would say if he could tell her that, if he could paint for her the most awful hour in his remembrance, more terrible even than that of seeing his mother suffer under mortal disease, when Anne had actually given way before him, the only time in her ordered life, and accused him of the cruelty of not loving her. This had not been the thin passion of the family portraits smiling down on them from her walls, but the terrible nerve-destroying anguish of a woman scorned. That was one of the things in his life he never allowed himself to think about; but it would, in moments of physical weariness, come beating at the door. He would hear it leave the threshold while he sat, hands clenched and lips shut tight, and go prowling round the house, peering in at him through the windows, bidding him waken and remember. And when he did find himself forced to remember before he could get out of doors and walk or ride, it was always with an incredulous amazement that he had, in that moment of her downfall, found the courage to withstand her. When the implacable ghost of remembrance flashed on his mind the picture of her, face wet with streaming tears, hands outstretched to him—beautiful hands, the product of five generations of idleness and care—why did he not meet her passion with some decency of response, swear he did love her, and spend the rest of his life in making good? Would a lifetime of dogged endurance be too much for a man to give, to save all this inherited delicacy of type from the ruin of knowing it had betrayed itself and was delicate no more?—the keenest pang it could feel in a world made, to that circumscribed, over-cultured intelligence, for the nurture of such flowers of life. He felt, as he stood there looking despairingly upon her, as if he had seen all the manufactured expensiveness of the world, lustrous silks, bloom of velvet, filigreed jewels, in rags and ruin. Yet there was more, and this it was that had brought enduring remorse to his mind. It was pride. That was in ruins. If she had assaulted him with the reproaches of an unfed passion, there would have been some savage response of rebuttal in him, to save them both from this meager sort of shame. But what could heal in a man's mind the vision of a woman's murdered pride, as deep as the pride of queens, in the days when the world itself bowed its neck for queens to set their feet on? Nan was looking at him curiously. He became aware of it, and returned to himself with a start. He must, he judged, have been acting queerly. It had never happened before that he had been under other eyes when the vision rose to plague him.

"You've been such a long time without speaking," said Nan gently. "What is it, Rookie dear?"

He shook his head. His forehead was damp with the sweat of his renewed remorses.

"There's such a lot of things, Nan," he answered, "that can't be said."

"Yes," she agreed, "that's true. Want me to go home?"

He didn't want her to go home. He caught at her dear presence. Almost he wished he might tell her how horrible it was, not only to repudiate Anne's last request of him, but to feel he was repudiating it on the heels of that other refusal years ago.

"No, dear," he said, "not yet. I'll go with you when you must."

"I don't believe," Nan ventured, "it's as bad as you think. She did do some foolish things," she meditated, "these last years."

"She did some hideous things," said Raven, "because they weren't normal. They weren't decent. And so they weren't right."

"Maybe I don't know so much as you do about them," said Nan. "You see she was so furious with me for going to France——"

"Oh, don't say she was furious," urged Raven, still out of that sense of her being in the room. "It would hurt her so confoundedly."

"Well, she was, you see," said Nan. "I thought you knew about it. But I remember, you'd gone. And when I told her I was going over, she was furious. Oh, she was, Rookie! You can't say anything else. I know Aunt Anne."

"But just cut out some of the adjectives," said Raven, still with that sense of Anne's being in the room and the unsportsmanlike business of putting her in her place when she could not, even from her place, defend herself. "She never was furious. She simply didn't believe in war and she wouldn't join any relief work and didn't want you to."

"She wouldn't join any relief work," said Nan, relentlessly rehearsing. "She said the most frightful things and said them publicly. She ought to have been arrested, only they didn't take the trouble. She wasn't a Quaker. There was nothing inbred to excuse her. We're decent folks, Rookie, we Hamiltons. But she stood for non-resistance. She said Belgium shouldn't have resisted, and England shouldn't have gone in, and France shouldn't have lifted a finger or thrown a bomb, and when you told her—that is, I told her—she was crazy, she said something awful."

Raven was startled out of his determination to show no curiosity.

"What did she say?" he asked. "What was it that was awful?"

Nan seemed to have paled a little under the rose-leaf texture of her cheek.

"Why, you know," she said, "what they all come back to. Whatever they believe, they come back to that. I don't see how they can. I couldn't, it scares me so. They tell you what He said—Christ."

Raven sat looking at her, wondering absently, in the unregarded depths of his mind, how they could go on with a talk that was ploughing deeper and deeper and yet could get nowhere in the end. For certainly they were both mercifully bent on saving Anne, and Anne, under this shadow of her latest past, herself would not let them.

"She absolutely forbade my going to France," said Nan, this with no special feeling, but as if she had dwelt on it until there was no emotion left to put into it. "She said it was notoriety I wanted. I told her I'd scrub floors over there, if they wanted me to. It proved I did, too, you know. I did it remarkably well. And then she said she forbade me, and I reminded her I was of age and had my own money. And I went."

Raven nodded. He thought they had said enough, but Nan's calm impartiality did rest him. It was something he could not himself attain.

"And now," said Nan, "she wants you to keep on doing the fool things she'd have done then, if they'd let her. She probably wants to get up a big scheme of propaganda and put it into the schools. And every blessed boy and girl in this country is to be taught not to serve the truth and do his job but—safety first."

"Yes," said Raven, drearily "I suppose that's about it."

"But actually," said Nan, suddenly aware that he had not told her, "what does she say? Does she specify? What does she say?"

"She says," Raven answered, in a toneless voice, glancing at the letter but making no movement toward sharing it with her more definitely, "that her money is to build a Palace of Peace—she doesn't say where—for lectures, demonstrations of the sort I know she approves, all the activities possible in the lines she has been following—for the doctrine of non-resistance and the consequent abolishment of war."

Again he ended drearily.

"Well," said Nan, "what are you going to do about it? going to spend your life and the lives of a lot of more or less intelligent pacifists teaching children to compute the number of movies they could go to for the money spent on one battleship——"

"But, good God, Nan!" Raven broke in, "you and I don't want to preach war."

"No," said Nan, "but we can't let Aunt Anne preach peace: not her brand, as we've seen it. O Rookie! what's the use of taking the world as it isn't? Why don't we see if we can't make something of the old thing as it is and has been? and blest if I don't believe as it always will be?"

Raven looked at her in a maze of interrogation. Was this the fragility of girlhood speaking, or was it womanhood, old as time itself, with the knowledge of good and evil? She answered the look.

"No," she said, "I'm not a kid. Don't think it. I suppose it's because I've seen—life."

The pause before the last word, the drop on the word itself was not from bitterness, he knew. But it was sad.

"Well," he said irrepressibly, "you've seen life, and what do you think of it?"

She hesitated. Then she put out her hand and touched the petal of a rose, one of a great dome of splendor in a bowl.

"I like—roses," she said whimsically.

She looked at him with that most moving look of a lovely face: the knitted brows of rueful questioning, the smiling lips. Raven, staring back at her, felt a sudden impulse to speak, to tell. It was the form of her reply that invited him.

"I don't believe, Nan," he said, "I even care about roses. I don't care about the whole infernal scheme. That's what I sent for Dick for—to tell him. Practically, you know I should have to tell Dick. And I haven't done it and now I'm telling you."

III

Nan sat looking at him with an air of patient alertness, ready, he saw, to meet what he had to say and do the best she could with it. He had an irritated apprehension that, as her work through the last few years had lain chiefly in meeting emergencies, so now he was an emergency. And as Dick, poet though the inner circle of journalism had listed him, might not understand in the least what he was driving at, so there was danger of Nan's understanding too quickly and too much, with the resultant embarrassment of thinking something could be done. And nothing could be done beyond the palliatives he meant to allow himself. He would try her. He might see how far she would insist on going with him along his dreary way. What if she had Anne's over-developed and thwarted maternity of helpfulness? What if she insisted on going all the way and never leaving him to the blessed seclusion of his own soul?

"You see, Nan," he adventured, "I'm sick of the whole show."

She nodded.

"Yes," she said, "I know. Coming back. Finding we aren't any better than we were before we got frightened and said our prayers and promised God if He'd stop the War we'd be different forever and ever, amen. That's it, Rookie, isn't it?"

"Why, yes," said Raven, staring at her, she seemed so accurate, according to his own mental gauging, and so unmoved in her flippancy, "that's pretty nearly it."

She nodded at him again, whether to hearten him or to assure him of their perfect unison he could not tell.

"It was an awful jolt, wasn't it?" she inquired frankly. "You know, I should think it might make some of them laugh, the ones they say observe us from—where is it from? Mars? up in the heavens somewhere. It's like reading a bitter sort of book. It is funny. Rookie, don't you think it's funny?"

Raven remembered a character in Mr. Owen Wister's "Virginian," the hen crazed by her thwarted destiny.

"Well," he said, quoting "The Virginian," "not so damned funny either. But how the dickens did you know what I was going to say?"

"Because it's what we've all come back to," said she, "and what everybody that stayed at home feels, or ought to if they've got anything inside their nuts. Just think, Rookie! we were like the great multitude in the Bible, somewhere, praising God. We broke our idols and—I don't know what we didn't do. And now we're not scared any more, we've set 'em up again: same old idols. Rookie, I bet you the only reason we ever sacrificed to God at all was because we thought He was the biggest joss and things were so desperate and all, we'd better make a sure thing of it. And now we think we aren't in any particular danger, seems as if the little gods would do, same as they did before; and they're not so expensive."

"Goodness, Nan!" said Raven, "how naughty you are. You didn't use to run on so."

"I haven't talked very much to you," said Nan drily, "not since I grew up."

He knew it was true, and knew also that the reason was, if she had allowed her lips to utter it, "Aunt Anne wouldn't let me."

"But," she said, "I don't understand altogether. I know you're mad and discouraged and all the rest of it. But I don't see what Dick has got to do with it."

"It's simply this," said Raven. "I'm going away."

She looked at him in what seemed to be serious alarm.

"Relief work?" she asked. "Reconstruction?"

"No," said Raven. "I don't believe I should be any good to them. There isn't a blamed thing I can do, so far as I see, except for what money I've got. I'm no good, Nan. I shouldn't sell for my hide and horns. And I hate the whole blamed show. I'm sick of it. I'm sick of the system, from the beasts that devour one another to the rest of us. And I'm simply going to desert. I'm going to run away."

"Where?" asked Nan. "You can't run away from the earth."

"No," said Raven, "I can't jump off. So I'm going to do the next convenient thing. I'm going up to Wake Hill and shovel snow with Jerry, and maybe get into the woods and do some thinning out and, if I remember anything about the millennium we've just shaved the edge of, just say to myself there ain't a-going to be no millenium, so I can shut up."

"You've taken advice, haven't you?" she concluded. "That's what they've prescribed. I suppose it's all right."

"Good God, no!" said Raven. "Do you think I've been to a doctor and turned myself inside out? I'm going because Wake Hill is as far out of the world as I can manage. If the whole earth hadn't gone crazy, I'd cut stick for Tartary or some confounded place that isn't on the map. But they're all on the map. There isn't an inch of ground that isn't under some sort of moral searchlight. No, I'll be hanged if it's moral. It's only the mites in the cheese getting busy and stirring up fermentation."

Nan laughed out and then looked up at him in her rueful apology.

"I couldn't help it," she said. "I thought of Dick, your telling him. Dick's just got his book ready for the printer: Democracy, you know, in three-legged verse. And they'll say it's full of insight and prophecy. That's what they said about the other one: insight, prophecy! But Dick won't have the least idea what you're driving at."

"You see," said Raven, "he's thinking of doing some stiff work and getting a degree: a sort of sop to his mother. She's as wild as a hawk, you know, to get him to distinguish himself, doesn't much care how. I'd meant to ask him to camp here with me this winter. I believe I did actually ask him, now I think of it."

"Yes, you did," said Nan. "It'll make a lot of difference to him, your being away."

"I don't think so," said Raven. "Anyhow, he'll have to get used to it, especially as I'm not merely going away. I'm getting out, out of the business and all."

He was really surprising her now. She had grown up in the atmosphere of belief in that particular business. When a Hamilton said his earthly creed, he would have begun, if he had been honest, "I believe in wool."

"You're not retiring?" she hesitated.

"Yes."

"Made your pile, Rookie?"

At once they thought of Anne and the new complication she had saddled him with.

"That isn't the question," he evaded. "The amount of it is, I couldn't go to the office every morning and come home and go the next day, without—well, Nan, frankly, going off my nut. I hate it. I hate the whole business of what we call civilized life. I even think of giving Dick power of attorney and passing all my stuff over into his hands."

"Oh, no," said Nan quickly, "you mustn't do that."

He frowned at her, perplexedly.

"Don't you trust him?" he asked. "Don't you trust Dick?"

"Of course I trust Dick," said she impatiently, "his intentions, that is."

"You ought to," said Raven. "You're bound to, the man you're going to marry."

She kept her eyes on him, but she said nothing. And suddenly Raven realized that he wanted to know about this business of marrying Dick. He wanted to know tremendously. Yet, though this was the little Nan who sometimes used to seem more his child than anybody's, he could not ask her. She looked difficult, if not wayward.

"Well," he compromised, "that's about where it is. I'm going into the country, to get away from the clack of men. My income, all but the little of it I set aside for food and taxes, will go to France. It may go through Dick or it may——Oh, well, well," he added, seeing the quick rebuttal again on her face, "that hasn't got to be decided in a hurry. But ultimately it goes to France."

"Why France?" asked Nan. "I see, though. They're all deserting her."

"It isn't altogether that," said Raven, as if he hadn't finished thinking it out. "It's because I believe in her so tremendously, that quick intelligence of hers. She mustn't be downed, mustn't be kept depleted. It's a loss too horrible to face. She sees the world as it is. She knows the dangers. She's got to be protected from them, so she can go on seeing."

"What does she see?" asked Nan curiously. "What kind of thing?"

"Everything. Life. When it comes to what the collective brain can do, you can't limit her. You never'll make her believe in miracles, but she can find out how they're done."

"Mercy!" said Nan. "You talk like a book."

"Notes, for an essay: 'France.' I've been thinking 'em out. How she ought to be given a hand, so she doesn't have to spend the next thirty years or so outwitting the German devil. That's hard sledding for her beautiful intelligence. She ought to be safe, so she can turn it to other things: the science of living, hers, ours, everybody's."

"Ah," said Nan, "but they'll tell you it won't be for everybody: only France."

"That's the point," said Raven. "It's a gamble. But they can't deny she's got the beautiful intelligence. I can trust anything so perfect. I trust it absolutely."

"Why don't we do it ourselves? Build a fire under us, Rookie. Come on!"

"We aren't homogeneous," said Raven. "We've no race spirit, no live nerve through the whole of us. France has. That mind of hers, that leaping intelligence! If she were as holy as she is keen, she'd make the world the poets dreamed of."

"Then go to it," said Nan. "Turn in your money. I will mine. Stump you!"

"Not yet," said Raven. "You sit tight and see how I come out. I haven't got enough to set the Seine afire, but such as it is, I'd like to turn it over to her for what she needs most: agriculture, schools, research. Administered so it could be withdrawn if she didn't make good and turned in somewhere else. Oh, it's a gamble! I told you it was. But administered, mind you. That's the point."

"Through Dick," she commented, plainly with dissatisfaction. "Now, why Dick?"

"Because," said Raven, "Dick's got a head for organizing. He's his father over again, plus the Raven streak. And the Raven streak doesn't do him any harm. It isn't soft, like Old Crow—and me. It's his mother in him, and she takes back—but O Lord! what's the sense of going into that?"

"Anyhow," said Nan, with decision, "you keep your affairs in your own hands."

"For the present, yes," said Raven. "And I do want to think it out in detail. I can do it at Wake Hill. I shall get on my pins enough for that."

"Isn't it funny?" said she. "Aunt Anne with her Palace of Peace and you with your invincible France. But, Rookie, you hear to me. Whatever you do with your own money, you do it your own way. Don't be a slacker."

Raven sat looking at her, a slow smile dawning. He rather liked Nan's taking him in hand.

"That's it, is it?" he asked, with a relish she was glad to see. "A slacker! so be it. If I'm a slacker, I am. I'm a conscientious objector. What I object to is the universe, the pattern it's made on. I object to the way we're running it, and, being made as we are, I don't see how we can be expected to do anything but what we're doing. It's a perfectly logical proposition. And except for a few minor chores I've got to see to, I simply won't play."

Nan was thinking. She looked down at her hands, lying in her lap. Raven looked at them also and wondered, as he often had, since they came home, how such hands could have done the tasks she set them to. She looked up and met his eyes gravely with something imperative in hers. It is a way women have sometimes. They seem to be calling on the boy in man and bidding him take heed.

"I wouldn't," said she, "talk to Dick about going to Wake Hill."

"What would you do? Cut stick, and let him wonder what in the deuce it's all about?"

"I wouldn't talk; I'd write."

"Oh, write!—what's the difference?"

"If you talk, he'll say something that'll shut you up and you'll be just as far apart as you are to-day. If you write, you can tell him as much as you want to and no more. And the first thing he'll do will be to bring the letter to me."

"I see," said Raven. "And you'll interpret."

"I'll interpret. I can, Rookie. I know you, don't I? and I know Dick."

"You ought to," said Raven rashly again because he was again curious, "the man you're going to marry."

"Yes," said Nan calmly, rising, "the man I'm going to marry. Only"—her face, as she turned it to him, brimmed over with a childish sort of fun—"don't tell him that, Rookie. It's perfectly true I haven't promised him. And I don't mean to—yet."

"Quite right," said Raven, rising. He felt a distinct relief. He, too, wanted to see what Dick would make of himself. "You do your own telling."

"There he is," said Nan, "just as it is in a play. We've got to a climax and he comes in at the door. But, Rookie——" She stopped, for Dick was nearing in the hall, and Raven knew what she would have said. It was in both their minds. They hadn't finished their talk. It had merely strayed into another channel, or bolted and run away there. Aunt Anne's money and her Palace of Peace still stared them in the face. Dick put his head in at the door. He looked rather sheepish, as if his dignified going had been invalidated by this impetuous coming back, as if he couldn't live without Nan and she was bound to see through it.

"Well?" he said gruffly. "Talked out?"

They both laughed, with the sudden absurdity of it. How should they, their eyes questioned each other, ever be talked out, what with Aunt Anne and the universe and France?

"Absolutely," said Nan. "Good night, Rookie. Going to write your letter? Come on, Dick."

IV

Raven sat down at the table and began his letter. He was wrestling with it at once, to give himself no time to argue over the point of its being no ordinary letter such as he had been accustomed to write to Dick. He began with the succinct statement of what he meant to do. He had made all his arrangements for getting out of the business. They could be concluded in short order. As to the business itself, he had no complaint to make. The old man—he permitted himself this indulgence as he never could have in Anne's lifetime, as touching her father—the old man had been square all through. He was as good as they make 'em. But there was nothing for him, Raven, in the concern except its cumulative capacity for making money. He'd no traditional pride in it, as the old man had. He'd worked for all he was worth, to squeeze every drop he could out of it so that his mother—"your grandmother, you know, Dick"—might have every last luxury she wanted. Well, she'd had 'em, though one of the ironical things about it was that she didn't want so very many, and he needn't have worked so hard or so long. However, that's neither here nor there. What's done is done. The War's done—they say—and the thing that would please Raven best would be——Here he brought up with a full stop. He was running into dangerous revelations, going back to a previous state of mind, one he had begun cherishing as soon as his mother died, and even caressed, with a sort of denied passion, when Anne also died, and he felt so shamefacedly free. All his life he had wanted to wander, to explore, to bruise himself against the earth and pick himself up and go on and get bruised again. He loved the earth, he wanted her, in her magnificence and cruelty, wanted to write about her, and make the portrait of her for stay-at-homes who weren't adventurous and were content with reading about her in the blank moments after the office grind. Yet he was a stay-at-home himself. Why? in God's name why?

He asked himself the question, as he sat with lifted pen, almost the words dropping off it, to tell Dick the things it would be simply disconcerting to know. Raven saw, with a sad clearness, why he hadn't written the books he wanted to about the earth. They would have been rough books, full of rock and clay and the tumbling of rivers and thunder grumbling in the clouds. If he had been really afraid of Anne and her ordered ambitions for him, he could have printed them under an assumed name. She need never have known at all. They wouldn't have been the books he could have written if he had been foot-loose and gone blundering along in strange trails over the earth, but they might have held something of the sort his inner man wanted to fashion. And if the secret of them had been kept, they needn't have interfered with his smug little folk stories Anne and her women's clubs prized so much. Had he been actually afraid of Anne? Was he one of the men who are shamefully under the feminine finger, subject to mother, subject to wife, without the nerve—scarcely the wish, indeed—to break away? He was not afraid of his mother, or, if he had been, it was the fear of hurting her who had been so hurt already. Ever since he could remember, he saw himself, even as a little boy, trying to get her away from his father who had a positive cast of mind, a perfect certainty of being right and a confirmed belief that robust measures always were the thing. If you did wrong, you were to be punished, promptly and effectually. If you were afraid of the dark, and came downstairs in your nightgown upon the family sitting by the lamp, you were whaled for it, to teach you there was something worse than bed even in the dark. If you said your head ached and you couldn't eat bacon and greens, which father elected to consider a normal dish, you were made to eat a lot with no matter what dire result, because there wasn't a physical ill which couldn't be mended by treating it robustly. He was God. He knew. And he was perfectly well and had never once for half a minute entered into those disordered cells of bodily ill where the atom cries to its Creator in an anguish of bewilderment and pain. And when his body met the fate appointed for its destruction, as all bodies must, and he was brought home broken after the runaway that made him a thing almost too terrible to look upon, except by eyes so full of compassion that they love the more, Raven, then a very little John, found himself wondering how it seemed to father now. Even runaways, father had appeared to think, could always be governed, if you kept your head.

They never knew what he thought. He died quickly, under opiates, and John believed his mother was so thankful for the merciful haste of it that she could not, until long after, recall herself to mourn. And she did honestly mourn. The little John was glad of that. So ill and tired had she been for years and yet so bound upon the rack of her husband's Spartan theories for her, that John thought he could not have borne it if she had not adored her righteous tormentor, if she had had to look on him as her master, not her lord by love. It seemed to him he was always mourning over his mother, in those days, always lying awake and wondering if she were awake, too, always trying to save her from some task too heavy for her and too heavy for him also, so that, if she were to be saved, it had to be by stratagem. But stratagem was difficult in that house, because his older sister, who became Dick's mother, was of her father's temperament, always perfectly well and also an inferior god who knew at every point what to do, and she had not merely imbibed father's certainty that the only thing mother needed was to take a brace: she had it by nature. And when, father being gone to heaven—and John, young John now, not little any more, made no doubt he had gone, it pleased mother so to say it and be obligingly agreed with—Amelia, his sister, took her departure, on the night of her marriage with a very prosperous Mr. Powell, for the middle west, John Raven, then beginning his apprenticeship to wool, danced a fantastic fling in the sitting-room where the wedding gifts still lay displayed and whooped with emotion at last let loose. His mother, in the gray silk and commendable lace Amelia had selected and he had paid for, did smile unwillingly, but she spoke to him in the reproving tone which was the limit of severity his boyhood had known from her and which he had learned, in those earliest days, meant nothing at all:

"I'd be ashamed! Any one would think you were glad your sister had gone!"

John did not say he was glad. He knew too much to stir up loyal reactions in mother's conscience. He simply wove a dance of intricate mazes about her, as she sat in her chair, and his inner mind was one pæan of thanksgiving to God, not the spurious gods who had been his father and sister, but the mysterious Deity who had, for obscure purposes, called them into being, because now John had at last full swing and could let mother out of bondage. What difference did it make that he wasn't trekking through darkest Africa or being hunted by the jungle in India, so long as mother was out of bondage? He even took his allegiance to Anne rather lightly, those first years, he was so absent-minded about everything but hypnotising mother into thinking she was going to be very happy and live a long time doing it. And that was the part of his life when there seemed to be a great deal of it, and if he didn't have a thing now there would be plenty of chances to snatch at it later. He had simply been eaten up, the energy of him, the will, perhaps, by compassion. And then his mother had died and he knew he could have done no more for her than he had done, and while he was turning round to look about him—and ah! in that lean year came Anne's horrible accusation that he did not love her!—the War broke out, and he felt himself shocked into action. The very atoms of his body seemed to fall asunder and rearrange themselves and, as soon as he could decently get away, without throwing the bewilderment of the business on Anne, he had gone, and he had never seen her again.

He had written to her faithfully, and with the compassion that was either natally or by the habit of life a part of him, but he had not obeyed her. For she begged him, almost, at intervals, commanded him, to return to work with her for the peace of mankind. At first he tried to explain himself and assuage her grief over what she called his desertion of their common ideals. He answered the arguments in the letters that had become a misery to him to receive as his had become an inexpressible burden to write. Finally, with a wrench to himself, he ceased, and, with infinite pains, compiled data that might interest without offending her. The letters continued, but as soon as he found she was sending him abstractions valueless because they had no roots in the living issues of things, he had to stop. That, not her death, had been their lasting farewell.

What, in the name of all that was mysterious, he reflected, had made Anne—and so early—assume the burden of an unasked allegiance to him? His family and hers had been next-door neighbors at Wake Hill, but on no equality of worldly footing. The Hamiltons, thriving on wool, had been able to buy for themselves all the picturesque luxuries of civilized life. Their women toiled not. Their delicate air was the product of tuition in dainty ways. Their men had acquired the unconscious pose of dominance, of knowing what was their due and expecting to get it without argument. Sometimes up there at Wake Hill they did receive a disconcerting knock or two from some "embattled farmer" whom they called "my man," and who didn't like the sound of it. But the answering rebuff never penetrated the fine mail of their acquired arrogance. It meant, they smilingly said, "New England," and tolerantly passed it by. Raven's people were of a different stripe, "brainy," he thought with an unspoken pride of his own, yet deficient in a certain practical quality of taking the world "but as the world," and consequently always poor. Their ways were rougher ways. Their women had to work to trim the edges of their plainer surroundings with the alleviating prettinesses the Hamiltons cast aside with every changing style. And Anne, coming home from Europe one summer, where she had not only seen wonder and beauty, already familiar to her—for she was a young lady then—and where he knew she had met men and women whose names were trumpet calls in his ears—singled him out, in his shyness and obscurity, and offered him the key to the fulfilment of his dreams. Education, travel, the life of books—all were in her hand, the potential fruit of her father's doting affection for her, and all were to be his. What could have inspired her with so wholesale and fantastic a philanthropy? He could never adequately guess, and he was no nearer doing it now than in the old bewildering days when the Hesperidean apples were dropping over him and he was, from some shy instinct, dodging to avoid them. And the reason he had never guessed and never could guess was that he left out of all the data at his hand the one first moving factor: that he was a beautiful youth and Anne had imperiously loved him and had never ceased to love.

As he sat there, the pen lifted, his mind going back over the things that had led him away from adventure into wool, and were now leading him as far from wool as might be, he was tempted. What if, in spite of Nan, he should risk it and tell Dick, once for all, why he was going away, make it clear so there should be no after-persuasions, no clutter of half understanding? He was tired of thinking about his life as a life. The temptation to such morose musing had come upon him in the last six months, and once yielded to, he felt the egotistical disease of it through his very blood and bones. If he were Catholic, he could confess and get rid of it. He was not Catholic, only pagan, the natural man. The Church had a wisdom of her own. All her rites and ceremonies found their root in something salutary for the human mind. Confession was salutary. You might not be absolved, but if you were pagan you could believe that the very act of it absolved you. Nan said Dick never would understand. So much the better. Let him carry off the burden of it. If he understood, he'd see the extreme sacredness of a confidence entrusted to him. If he didn't, he'd hide it as a thing you'd better say as little about as possible. So he tucked his first letter into its envelope and began to write again, with no date and no direct address, but from a sense that it was going to be an enormously comforting thing to do.

V

"I think I'll tell you the real reason why I'm going to Wake Hill. I've told you I'm going, but just as my nerves move the muscles that move my legs to go, so my will moves my nerves and the me that is inside somewhere and is a perfect stranger to you—and also to the me I am used to myself—moves my will. You see, the me inside me knows there's something wrong. Something mighty bad—or it may be merely inevitable—has happened to me. I went through the War all right, on a pretty even keel, because I thought I saw a bright light at the end. I thought we all saw the light. And the light wasn't any electric signboard out to say there never would be any more wars, but it was a light you could see to read by. You could see the stars and see them differently from the old way we'd been seeing them. We could see the moon and the Milky Way—but I suppose that comes under stars—and the upshot of it was that we thought we saw God. And after you'd seen God, you knew saying there shouldn't be any more war was only beginning at the wrong end of the puzzle. Of course war is a damnable business, perhaps the most damnable we go into because it's so wholesale. But if you begin at the right end of the puzzle and not the wrong, the thing we learn is that the only reality in this universe for which it's worth going through the obscene hells of which war is one, is God. To be aware of Him, not to explain Him. You can't explain Him. You can't explain what He's done to you or means to do. All you can do is to keep your eye on Him and fall in.

"I came home. I was rather cracked, when I got here, I was so pleased with my little plaything. I'd seen God. I was only one of a good many millions that saw Him. And it was exactly as if you went into an enchanter's cave and expected to find some dream you'd dreamed made real, and all you found was the Forty Thieves sitting there counting over their spoils. No! no! it isn't an allegory. I don't mean America and profiteers. I don't mean anybody particularly. But it began to come over me more and more every day that we and everybody else on the round world, if they had seen God, had forgotten all about it. Just as the old-fashioned men at Wake Hill used to read their Bible Sunday and put it away on the parlor table with the album and go out early Monday morning to carry the apples to market all deaconed on top. By George! we were the same old lot. And worse, for we'd had our look through the peep-hole into eternities, and now we said, 'It makes my eyes ache. I'm going to wear a shade.' No, son, I don't mean Leagues of Nations and Internationalism or any of the quack remedies. I mean just God. We'd been badly scared—Nan said so to-day—and we got down on our knees and howled to the Highest and offered Him tribute.

"Now you may say that even if the whole world had forgotten God, if I'd seen Him why couldn't I still remember Him? Why couldn't I consider the millions of years that go to the making of man and do my little bit and wait on His will? Because my temptation came on me. I was tempted in the wilderness of my own credulity and conceit. For I looked back over time past and I said like Solomon—I don't know whether he ever said it, but he's the most blasé Johnnie I remember—'All is vanity.' As it was in the beginning, so it ever shall be. We are not made in the image of God. We are made rather grotesquely out of dust, and to dust we shall return, all our hopes, all our aspirations, all the pretty plans we form for defeating death and time. And who made us and put us on this dark planet where it is next to impossible to see a step before us? God. Who is responsible for us? God. Can we find out His will? Never. Can we hope for any alleviation of misery on our dark planet? Never: for if we seek out many inventions to down disease and poverty, we shall unloose as many by-products of discovery and bring new plagues upon us. And so I had to turn away from God. Do you see? I didn't deny He exists. I didn't accuse Him of bad faith to us. How can He show either good faith or bad when He has made us no promises? He has merely set us on the dark planet and forced us to whirl with it on the wheel of time. And so, do you see, having turned away from God—and I had to, I had to in mere honesty—I simply lost Him. And having lost Him, there is nothing left to lose. Also, having once seen Him and then lost Him, I can't take up the puzzle again. I can't play the game. If I hadn't what we New Englanders call common sense, I suppose I should put an end to myself. What would be the good? He would simply catch me, like a rabbit out of a cage, and chuck me back again on the dark planet. Don't think I blame Him. He wouldn't do it out of cruelty. He'd have to put me back. That's the way His laws are made. So I'm going up to Wake Hill and live with Charlotte and Jerry, and see if I can't get tired enough every day to sleep at night. I couldn't keep on here. I couldn't. What we call civilization is too sickening to me. I should simply go off my nut. And when you come to that, it's an awful complication, besides the suffering of it. That I shrink from, too. I'm talking a good deal, but actually it's the thing I least want to do. I don't want a fuss."

Here he paused, wondered if he had more to say, thinking Dick must be unusually dull, even for a poet, if he couldn't understand such a plain state of things, and then took an irrational satisfaction in carefully folding these last pages and putting them in the envelope with what he had written first. He addressed the envelope to Dick, sealed and weighed it, got up and stretched himself and felt distinctly better. He had, in a way, confessed, and it was having the effect on him he had so sagely anticipated. He could sleep to-night. And he did sleep. It was one of the nights he used to have after long tramps about Wake Hill, when his tired legs thrilled deliciously before they sank into a swoon of nothingness.

In the morning, he leaped the chasm from four to six, a wakeful misery of late, when he was accustomed to go over and over the last harassing pages in his book of doubts. He did not wake until seven, and then it was with a clear-eyed resumption of consciousness. And here he was, exactly as he had found himself on other mornings when the bath of oblivion had not been so deep. Here was his world, the world he was trying to run away from, waiting for him in all its ordered hostilities. Immediately it struck him full in the center that, instead of having something less to brood upon by reason of his confession to Dick, he had saddled himself with more. He had the letter itself to repent of. He had given, not his unhappiness but his actual self away, and, no matter how clearly Dick understood, he had conjured up another anguish in admitting to his disordered inner world the lenses of another mind. This was only a matter of a second's disconcerting thought. It was also immediately clear to him that the letter must not go, and he spoke from his bedside to the kitchen and gave orders that nothing should be mailed until he came down. A contrite voice replied. The letters were mailed: that is, the thick one on the library table. Mary had gone in last night to lock the windows, and saw it, and knew he had forgotten to leave it in the hall. He often did forget. It was stamped and sealed. And the furnace man came then. Raven thought he might, in another minute, be groaning into her sympathetic ear; so he shut her up with an assurance that it was all right. But he felt the sweat start on his forehead at the picture of Dick sitting down to breakfast—Dick always ordered a big breakfast, having a hunter's appetite and a general impression that, the more he nourished himself, the more manly it would make his nose—and poring over the fable of his uncle's soul, or what seemed to be his soul, with eyes strained to their limit of credulity. However, it was of no use. Nothing was of any use when destiny had one of those ironic fits of hers and sat down to make a caricature of you, just for the fun of bursting her old sides over it. He dressed in a dogged haste, wondering if he'd better telephone Dick and ask him not to open any letter he might have from him that morning, and then dismissing it, because it had assuredly been received and Dick was now absorbing it with his chops and eggs.

Raven went down to his own eggs in a grim and sulky frame of mind. He would repudiate the letter, if need be, tell Dick it was only something he had written as a literary experiment and thought he'd try it on the dog. But the moment he heard the boy's key in the door and then his step through the hall, he knew he could not, for some unexplained reason inherent in his own frame of mind, "put it over." It was as if Dick represented the universe Raven was arraigning, was counsel for it, so to speak, and Raven had got, in sheer decency of honor, to stand to his guns. But it was all worse than he thought. Dick's entrance was so quick, his onslaught so unstudied, his glance so full of alarmed commiseration, that Raven saw at once he had been shocked out of all manly proprieties. Dick caught at a chair, on the way to the table, brought it with him and, placing it at a near angle to Raven's, dropped into it as if exhausted.

"I'd no idea," he began, "why, I'd no more idea——"

Raven's hand tightened on his fork. Then he laid the fork down, for, after all, he had finished breakfast, and might as well make the most of running his hands into his pockets and shutting them there.

"Morning, Dick," he said. "Have in some toast and eggs?"

Dick, in no mind even to weigh the significance of toast and eggs, was staring at him. He was cheated by a poverty of words when he most needed them, and could only repeat:

"I hadn't the least idea. I tell you it never occurred to me. I don't believe it did to Nan, either."

"What?" asked Raven. "What is it that didn't occur to you?"

"I did think of it when you first spoke of going to France, you know," said Dick, in a justification of himself that seemed more for his own ease than Raven's. "I didn't believe you could pull it off, a man of your years. You took it so easy! You never turned a hair. But I might have known you'd have to pay for it afterward."

"What is it I've taken so admirably?" asked Raven. "What is it I've got to pay for?"

"Why," said Dick, "your slogging over there—a man of your age——"

"Well," said Raven curtly, cracking his voice at him in a way Dick had never had to take from him, "how is it I'm paying? What's the matter with me?"

"Why," said Dick, in a perfect innocence of any offense in it, "don't you know? You've seen enough of it. I should think you'd be the first to know."

Raven simply looked at him. Dick had a feeling that his uncle was about to roar out something, and braced himself for the unbelievable event. However, it would not surprise him. That, he knew, was a part of it. But Raven was putting his question again, smoothly and tolerantly, as if to assure him there was time enough to make a well considered reply:

"Just what, in your opinion, is the matter with me?"

"Why," said Dick, that innocent gaze still upon him, "shell shock."

Raven jumped. Every nerve in him seemed to give a little twitch of pure surprise with every other.

"O Lord!" said he. "Who could ever have expected that? It's worse than I thought."

"Why, it's no disgrace," Dick assured him eagerly. "Think how many fellows have had it. They haven't got over it. They're having it now. The only thing to do is to recognize it and put yourself under treatment."

"That'll do," said Raven, with a determined calm. "Your diagnosis has gone far enough. And now I shall have to ask you to do two things for me."

"Two!" Dick echoed, and Raven, though at the end of his patience, was touched to see the suffused look of the boy's eyes. "You needn't cut it down to two. Just you tell me——"

There, though he was poetically eloquent and diffuse in print, he stopped and could literally say no more without an emotion he considered unworthy of him.

"Two things," said Raven. "One is to forget every blamed word of the screed I was jackass enough to send you. The other is to give me your word you won't mention it, even to me. Oh, there's another thing. Go home and burn the thing up."

Dick's eyes were all a wild apprehension.

"Oh," said he, "I can't burn it. I haven't got it."

"You haven't it? Who has?"

"Nobody—not yet."

"Oh, then you've destroyed it already."

"No," said Dick miserably. "I've sent it off."

"Who to? Nan?"

"No. Mother."

Raven could hardly believe him. He did not remember any illuminating confidences from Dick on the subject of mother, but he made no doubt the boy looked upon her as he did, as a force too eccentrically irresponsible to be unloosed.

"Well!" he said. The state of things struck him as too bad to be taken otherwise than calmly. You couldn't spend on it the amount of emotion it deserved, so you might as well get the credit with yourself and your antagonist of an attack unexpectedly gentle. "Now, what did you think you were doing when you sent it off to your mother?"

"Uncle Jack," said Dick, rather awkwardly blundering about his mental armory for some reasonable defense, "she's your sister."

"Yes," said Raven, "Milly is my sister. What then?"

"Then, why, then," said Dick, "when a thing like this happens to you, she'd feel it, wouldn't she?"

"You're perfectly sure you know what has happened to me? You trust your own diagnosis?"

"Of course I trust it," Dick burst forth. "Your letter—why, your letter isn't normal. Shell shock's a perfectly legitimate thing. You know it is. You're just the one to be hit. You did perfectly crazy things over there, entirely beyond any man of your years. And I'm mighty thankful we can put our finger on it. For if it isn't shell shock, it's something worse."

"You mean," said Raven, "I've gone off my nut."

Dick did not answer, but there could be no doubt of his own mental excitement, and he was apprehensive in a measure that moved Raven to an amused compassion. Raven sat looking at him a long minute. Then he got up and took his newspaper from the table beside him.

"Come," he said. "We'll go into the library and see if we can get anywhere."

Dick followed him, and they sat down together by the fire, this after Raven had moved a third chair into the space between them. He smiled at himself as he did it. It was the chair Nan had sat in the night before. He had a foolish feeling that he was invoking her remembered presence, calling on her to help them out.

"Now, Dick," he began, when they were seated, "you said something about my letter's not being normal. What is normal, when you come to that?"

Dick frowned into the fire. This, he felt, had some hidden leading, and he wasn't going to be caught.

"What's the use of asking fool questions?" he inquired, in his turn. "You know."

"Can't help it," said Raven. "I've got to be Socratic. Help me out, old man. Let me have my little game. What is normal?"

"Why," said Dick, floundering, "I suppose it's what the general run of people think—and do. It's keeping to the rules. It's trotting on the course. It isn't going off at some tangent of your own."

Dick felt rather proud of this, its fluency and general appositeness. He plucked up his spirits, thinking he might be going to manage Raven, after all.

"Now, see here," said Raven, suddenly leaning forward and looking at him in the friendliest community of feeling, "it means a good deal when a fellow of my years, as you say, gets a biff that sends him staggering."

"Just what I said," Dick assured him. "It's mighty serious. It's awful."

"Has it occurred to you," said Raven, "that I may be right?"

"Right? How right?"

Thereupon question and answer piled up fast.

"I've indicted the universe, as it were. How can you prove the universe hasn't laid herself open to it? How do you know the indictment of the creature she made and then ground under her heel isn't the very thing she's been waiting for all these millions of years?"

"Oh, come, Jack! the universe hasn't been waiting for you. That's a part of it, don't you see? You've got delusions, delusions of greatness, delusions——"

"Shut up. Don't use your spurious jargon on me. Just answer my questions. How do you know it isn't the healthiest thing that ever happened in this rotten tissue of pretense we call civilization for even one man—just one—to get up and swear at the whole system and swear again that, so far as his little midge's existence goes, he won't subscribe to it? What business have you to call that disease? How do you know it isn't health? How do you know I'm not one of the few normal atoms in the whole blamed carcass?"

Dick felt himself profoundly shocked. He was having to reverse his conclusions. Uncle Jack had stood for a well ordered sanity, conversant with wool and books and mysteriously devoted to Miss Anne Hamilton, whose conventional perfections evidently held within their limit Uncle Jack's highest ideals. Uncle Jack had shown a neat talent with his pen. He had grown middle-aged at an imperceptible and blameless pace, and now he was raging about like a sort of cave man with nothing less than the universe to bound his wild leaps and curvetings.

"But you know, Jack," he remonstrated feebly, "there isn't anything new in saying the nation's going to the dogs. The Britishers say it, we say it——"

"I don't say it," Raven asserted. "We're not going to the dogs. We've gone. We're there. We're the dogs ourselves, and nothing worse could happen to a criminal—from Mars, for example—than to be sent to us. We ought to be the convict colony of the universe."

"Don't," said Dick, with an affectionate sweetness as exasperating as it was moving. "It only excites you. Come on out and have a tramp. We could motor out to——"

"O Lord!" groaned Raven. "Why don't you beguile me up to the Psychopathic?"

Then he was, for the first time, aghast at what he had set going. Dick was looking at him again with that suffused glance of an affection too great to mind disclosing itself in all its pathetic abnegation.

"I couldn't say it myself," he began brokenly. "But you've said it; you see yourself. If you would——"

There he stopped and Raven sat staring at him. He felt as if the words had got inside his body and were somehow draining his heart. When he spoke, his voice sounded hoarse in his own ears.

"Dick, old man," he said, "I'm not—that."

"No! no!" Dick hastened to assure him, and somehow his hand had found Raven's and gripped it. "Only—O good God!" he ended, and got out of his chair and turned his back.

Raven, too, rose.

"Dick," said he quietly, "you go home now. And don't you speak about this to anybody, not to Nan even. You understand."

Dick nodded, still with his back turned, and got out of the room, and Raven thought he must have caught at his hat in the hall, and made one stride for the door. The door banged and Raven was alone.

VI

The next day Nan telephoned Raven that she was taking train for New York for perhaps a week's stay with the Seaburys. These were her nearest relatives, cousins at a remove Raven never really untangled, and of late they had been spending persuasive energy in trying to induce her to live with them. Since she had come home from France and Aunt Anne had died, they were always descending upon her for brief visits in the house where she succeeded Aunt Anne, and liking her so tumultuously, in her grown-up state, that they pelted her with arguments based on her presumable loneliness there and the silliness of carrying on the establishment really as a species of home for superannuated servants. Nan honestly liked the cousins, in a casual way, though it was as inconceivable to her that the Boston house might be given up as it would have been to Aunt Anne. There was, she felt, again in Aunt Anne's way, a certain continuity of things you didn't even think of breaking. Now she was seeking the Seaburys for reasons of her own. They had to be suitably told that Aunt Anne had left her money away from them as from her, and naturally, though ridiculously, to "that Raven she was always making a fool of herself about." They were ruthless of speech within family conclave, though any one of them would have thought more than twice about calling Aunt Anne any sort of fool, in her lifetime, even at a distance safely beyond hearing. Raven was not, if Nan could forestall the possibility, to be assaulted by mounting waves of family animosity.

Raven was glad, for once, to get rid of her, to find she was removing herself from the domestic turmoil he had created. There could not be the triangular discussions inevitable if she and Dick fell upon him at once, nor should he have to bear the warmth of her tumultous sympathy. Dick had evidently told her nothing, and he even gathered that she was going without notice to Dick. Then Raven began a systematic and rapid onslaught on his immediate affairs, to put them in order. Mr. Whitney, Anne's lawyer, who had always seemed to regard him in a disconcerting way as belonging to Anne, or her belonging in some undefined fashion to him, opened out expansively on the provisions of the will. He most sincerely congratulated Raven. Of course it was to have been expected, but——! Raven kept miserably to the proprieties of the moment. He listened with all due reserve, silent on the subject of Anne's letter. That was his affair, he thought, his and Nan's; unless, indeed, it was nobody's affair but Anne Hamilton's, and he was blindly to constitute himself the unreasoning agent of her trust. That must be thought out later. If he undertook it now, piling it on the pack of unsubstantial miseries he was carrying, he would be swamped utterly. He could only drop it into a dark pocket of his mind where an ill-assorted medley of dreads and fear lay waiting—for what? For a future less confusing than this inscrutable present? At least, they could not be even glanced at now. He wrote Charlotte and Jerry, his caretakers on the place at Wake Hill, that he was coming for an indefinite stay. He instructed his housekeeper in Boston that the house was to be kept open; possibly Mr. Richard would be there a good deal. Then he sat down to write his sister. That was the problem: what should he say to her who would presently be receiving his unfortunate screed with some inflammatory introduction from Dick and would—he knew her!—scarcely have finished it before she took steps toward flooding him with epistolary advice and comment. He could see her now at her desk, assembling data of conduct, bodily well-being, and putting it all down in that masterful hand of hers. That settled it. He mustn't write her. He must telegraph and forestall Dick. And he did telegraph her, on the moment, a message of noncommittal brevity:

"Letter Dick sent you is all poppycock. Forget it."

That might, he concluded, yet without hope, keep her from rushing her pen to the rescue, even if it did not prevent her fuming. And as he sat at the library table with a disorder of papers before him, Dick appeared at the door: good boy, full of zeal and pity. He looked so overflowing with honest affection, so eagerly ready to help that Raven exasperatedly loved him for his kind officiousness. Yet he had nothing for him but a gruff:

"Now what do you think you're here for?"

Dick was prepared for repulse, this or any other. He had armed himself against all possible whims and obstinacies, and he wore the air of a carefully adjusted patience.

"Can't I help there?" he inquired, advancing to the table and drawing up a chair. "Couldn't you let me run over those and just tell you what they are?"

"You go to thunder," said Raven, rapidly assorting, clapping into bundles and casting aside. "Yes, you can, too. Take this basket and empty it into the fireplace. Behind the log and smash it down so it won't set the chimney afire. Remember how your grandmother used to keep a scare going all the time for fear of chimneys? I guess I've inherited it. I have to use the formula."

Dick emptied the papers with a grave care foreign to him, as if even so small a service, at such a moment, bore a weightier meaning, and brought the basket back. He sat down and waited in a silence Raven felt more portentously vocal than the loudest outcry.

"Dick!" he said. He stopped work and looked at the youth, an unwilling smile twisting his mouth. He was not sure of its being well to take it humorously; yet it was funny. "Dick, if you've got anything to say, say it. If you haven't, clear out. This is my busy day."

Dick shook his head despairingly and yet obstinately. He wasn't going to leave Uncle Jack to the powers of darkness.

"Just tell me what you're winding things up for?" he ventured. "I ought to know."

"Then don't ask as if you were whispering into the ear of Buddha, or trying not to wake baby," said Raven, tearing a package of letters with a sudden savage haste. They were Anne's letters to him when he was in France, and he had meant to keep them because she would have an ideal of the sacredness they ought to bear, and exasperatingly the suggestion seemed to include a power of imposing itself on him. And if Dick hadn't come in to bait him with irrelevant questions, his perverse inner self excused itself, he might not be defying the ideal and tearing the letters up. As it was, he found them a salutary sacrifice.

"If you mean my going to Wake Hill, yes, I'm going. I've written Charlotte. Or rather I've addressed it to Jerry, she's so careful about his prerogative as a male."

"When?" asked Dick.

"The minute I get some boots and things to go logging in. This house will be open. You can come in and roost if you want to. If you marry Nan"—this was an audacity that occurred to him at the moment. It suddenly seemed to him a blessed comfort to think of Nan in his house—"you can come here and live."

Dick lost his sacrificial air and turned sulky.

"I don't know about Nan," he said. "I never know about her, not since we've come back. She was soft as—as silk over there."

"The maternal," said Raven briefly, tearing one of Anne's letters, with a crack, across the pages. "It was what you needed to keep you going. Not personal, only because you were a sojer boy."

The mortification of it all, the despite of not holding his own with her now he was not serving a cause, was plainly evident in Dick's face. He had had a bad night of it, after Nan's flouting and Uncle Jack's letter on top of that.

"She was beastly," he said, with no further elaboration.

But Raven knew he was returning to his walk home with her and some disconcerting circumstances of it. No doubt Nan had been ruthless. Her mind had been on Aunt Anne and the Palace of Peace. Little boys in love couldn't joggle her fighting arm and expect to escape irritated reproof.

"Nan's got a good deal to think of just now," he said. "Besides, you may not be man enough for her yet. Nan's very much of a woman. She'll expect things."

Dick sat glowering.

"I'm as much of a man as I was in France," he said obstinately. "More. I'm older." Then his sacrificial manner came back, and, remembering what he was there for, he resumed, all humble sweetness, like the little Dick who used to climb on Raven's knee and ask for a tell-story: "I'm going down with you. I've made all my plans."

Raven looked up at him in a new surprise.

"The deuce you are," said he. "No, you're not, boy. If I catch you down there I'll play the game as you've mapped it out for me. I'll grab Jerry's axe or pitchfork and run amuck, blest if I don't. You'll wake up and find yourself sending for the doctor."

Glancing cheerfully up, he was instantly aware, from the boy's unhappy face, that Dick believed him. Raven burst into a laugh, but he quickly sobered. What a snare they were getting themselves into, and only by an impish destiny of haphazard speech.

"Don't look so shocked, Dickie," he said flippantly. "I'm no more dotty than—Hamlet."

There he stopped again to wonder whimsically at the ill fate of it all. For Hamlet was mad; at least, Dick thought so. He couldn't have caught at anything more injurious to his cause.

"'They fool me to the top of my bent,'" he reflected ruefully.

That was what Dick was ready to do. But sister Amelia wouldn't fool him, if she got East with her emergency dressing bag and her perfectly equipped energy. She would clap him into the Psychopathic before he had time for even half as much blank verse as Hamlet had. They wouldn't allow him a first act.

"Don't look like that," he suggested again and kindly, because it was evident that, however irritating Dick might be as a prospective guardian, he was actually suffering an honest misery.

"I don't," said Dick. "I mean, I don't mean to look different. But somehow it's got me, this whole business has, and I can't get away from it. I've thought of it every minute since you told me. It isn't so much you I'm thinking about. It's him."

Raven, as a writer of English, paused to make a mental note that, in cases of extreme emotion, the nominative case, after the verb to be, is practically no good. You simply have to scrap it.

"Who?" he inquired, in the same line of natural language.

"Old Crow."

Dick uttered the name in a low and hesitating tone. He seemed to offer it unwillingly. Raven stared at him in a perfect surprise, now uncolored by any expectation he might have had of what was coming.

"Old Crow?" he repeated. "What do you know about Old Crow?"

"Well," said Dick, defensively, "I know as much as you do. That is, I suppose I do. I know as much as all Wake Hill does, anyway."

"Who told you?"

"Mother. I didn't suppose it was any secret."

"No," said Raven thoughtfully, "it's no secret. Only he was queer, he was eccentric, and so I've always assumed he had a pretty bad time of it. That's why I never've talked about him."

"Mother did," said Dick, in a sudden expansion. It seemed to ease him up a little, this leading Raven to the source of his own apprehension. Indeed, he had felt, since Raven's letter, that they must approach the matter of his tired wits with clearness, from the scientific standpoint. The more mental facts and theories they recognized the better. "She told me once you looked just like him, that old daguerreotype."

"Had sister Amelia concluded from that," inquired Raven quietly, "that I was bound to follow Old Crow, live in the woods and go missionarying across the mountain?"

"No," said Dick, so absorbed in his line of argument that he was innocently unaware of any intended irony. "She just happened to speak of it one day when we found the daguerreotype. Uncle Jack, just what do you know about him?"

Raven considered a moment. He was scanning his memory for old impressions and also, in his mild surprise over the pertinency of reviving them, wondering whether he had better pass them on. Or would they knot another tangle in the snarl he and Dick seemed to be, almost without their volition, making?

"Old Crow," he began slowly, "was my great-uncle. His name was John Raven. He was poor, like all the rest of us of that generation and the next, and did the usual things to advance himself, the things in successful men's biographies. He studied by the kitchen fire, not by pine knots, I fancy—that probably was the formula of a time just earlier. Anyhow he fitted himself for the college of the day, for some reason never went, but did go into a lawyer's office instead, was said to have trotted round after a gypsy sort of girl the other side of the mountain, found she was no good, went up into the woods and built the old hut I got into shape in the spring of 1914. Queer! I expected to go up there to study and write. I'd got to the point, I s'pose, where I thought if I had a different place to write in I could write better. Sure sign of waning powers! Well, he lived there by himself, and folks thought he was queer and began to call him Old Crow. I saw him several times when I was a little chap, never alone. Father took me with him when he went up to the hut to carry food. Mother never approved of my going. She disapproved of it so much that father stopped taking me."

"Well, you saw him," said Dick, in a way of holding him to his narrative, so that Raven, wondering why it was of such importance, bent a frowning look on him.

"Yes, I saw him. And he was nice to me, uncommon nice. He put his hand on my shoulder and looked down at me in a way—well, not the patronizing, grown-up way, but as if, now I come to think of it, as if he pitied me."

"How did he look?"

Dick was catching at things, Raven saw, the slightest clue to Old Crow's withdrawn personality. He seemed, on his side, to be constructing a portrait. Raven sought about in the closed chambers of his mind and produced one significant bit of remembrance after another. They were retrieved with difficulty out of the disorder of things regarded as of no importance: but here they were.

"He was tall, thin, rather hatchet-faced, something as I am. Oh, you knew that, didn't you? No beard, and I think he was the neatest person I ever saw. Father was clean shaven, you remember; but there were days when he either got lazy or was too busy to shave. I remember how exquisitely nice and peeled his face used to look on Sunday. But Old Crow was shaved all the time, judging from the way he looked the few times I saw him. I've heard father and mother speak of it, too. Charlotte told me once she'd seen him and he was neat as a new pin."

"How old was he when he went up there into the woods?"

"To live alone? I don't know. Forty, maybe. Comparatively young, anyway."

"Was it the woman? Was there a cause for it, a cause people knew?"

"There wasn't any cause I knew. He simply, so far as I ever heard, passed the place over to father—that was his nephew, you know—and went up the hill and built himself a log hut. It was well built. I only had to calk it some more and put in another flooring when I came into it."

As Raven went on, he became uncomfortably aware of the resemblance between his own proposed withdrawal and Old Crow's; but he stuck to it doggedly. It was all playing into Dick's hands and Amelia's, assuming he could predicate her mind; but he was resolved they shouldn't have it all their own way. He would give them every last straw of evidence, and it should do them no good in the end. There was a bravado about it. If Dick, in his affectionate virtue and Amelia in her energy of well-doing, wanted to challenge him to the proof, he'd give them a pretty tussle for it.

"What I want to know is," said Dick, "what he thought he was going off there for? Didn't anybody know?"

"They may have," said Raven. "I didn't know."

"And he lived his life out there, till he died?"

"Yes. And died in a very gentlemanly fashion, of pneumonia, and was found in a dignified position on his bed, hands folded, and everything in a great state of order, as if he'd known he was going and arranged things to give as little trouble as he could."

"What did he do up there all by himself? Read? Write?"

"He read a good deal, I believe. We found him reading when we went up."

"What sort of books?"

"Oh, hang it, Dick," said Raven, beginning to fidget under examination, "you're district-attorneying it a trifle too much to interest me. I'm getting bored, son. This isn't a third degree."

But Dick was not to be curbed or reasoned with.

"I think," he said, "if you don't mind, we'd better talk it out. You see I do really need to know about him, and you're the only one that can tell me. Mother's is chiefly hearsay."

"Fire away," said Raven easily, accepting the situation. He leaned back in his chair and began making patterns on the block of paper before him with a silver dagger at his hand. "What is it you want to know?"

"Everything. How the neighbors regarded him, what they said."

"The neighbors didn't regard him at all, in your sense. Don't you know the way country folks have of passing over the most eccentric things as if they're all in the day's work? They gossip like thunder, and, if they can whip up a scandal, they're made. But they never seem so awfully shocked. Perhaps it's because they're used to the plain facts of life, death, birth, madness, suicide. Maybe there's a sort of gaucherie about it. There are things you're shocked about that you wouldn't dare discuss at Cambridge or the Club. You'd be afraid it wasn't good form. Maybe you would though, now. Sometimes I forget the world's moved on a peg."

"But what did they say?"

"Can't tell you, Dick. I belong to the family, you know, and maybe they had some decency about talking over Old Crow when I was round. I don't think there was anything they could say. He was a perfectly clean, decent citizen. He kept on voting. He didn't meddle with them and they didn't with him. The only eccentricity about him was that he lived alone and that, the last ten years or so of his life, he tramped all round that region, over the mountain, too, taking care of the sick, if there were any. The last five years he went round preaching, and the very last year of all he took old Billy Jones into his hut, an awful old rip, if ever there was one, and tended him till his death—Billy's death, I mean. And if you consider that as indicating queerness—except that people don't do it—I don't. I should call any conventional disapproval of it an indictment rather, an indictment of Christianity. If it's too eccentric to fit into a so-called Christian civilization, that is."

Dick wasn't going to call it anything at the moment. He sat staring at the table, evidently reflecting, digesting and bowed down by his own gravity in a way that always amused Raven even when he loved the boy most. He fancied, when Dick looked like that, he was brooding over his nose.

"Take it easy, son," he advised him pleasantly. "You won't get anywhere with Old Crow. Guess again."

"No," said Dick, oblivious of the flippancy of this, "we sha'n't get anywhere. We haven't enough data."

"Now," said Raven, coming up from his lounging posture, "I've got to hustle. You run along and we'll go out somewhere to-night: dine, if you want to, and drop in at a show. But, for heaven's sake, don't go to digging up graveyards and expecting me to reconstruct your ancestors from as few bones as we've got of Old Crow's. You bore me sometimes, horribly, Dick. And that's the truth."

Dick did go away, though with an inarticulate remonstrance on his tongue. But Raven was good-natured and yet decided, and even went to the door with him, propelling him by a firm yet affectionate hand on his shoulder.

They did dine out that night in a manner mildly bohemian, really determined upon by Raven to show Dick he wasn't incapable yet of the accepted forms of diversion, afflictingly dull though they might prove.

VII

In less than a week Raven, hurried beyond any design of his own by Dick's anxious attentions, had actually gone. Once in the train on the way into the uplands where Wake Hill lies, he reflected, with a smile, that Dick had really helped him inconceivably in this matter of haste. He might have loitered along, dallying with the wisdom of going, and possibly ended by not going at all. But Dick's insistence on formulating the situation, his neatness and energy in getting all the emotions of the case into their proper pigeon holes, had so harassed and then bored him that he had worked like a beaver, he told himself, to get off and escape them altogether. And not a word from Amelia, either to his telegram or Dick's letter. Things were looking up. It might be Amelia had been elected to some new and absorbing organization for putting the social edifice still more irretrievably into the disorder it seemed bent for, in which case she might forget the inner wobblings of such an inconspicuous nomad as a brother in metaphysical pangs. He became recklessly optimistic, as the train climbed higher into the hills, and luxuriated in it, conscious all the time that it was altitude that was intoxicating him, not any real hope of hoodwinking Amelia. You couldn't do that so easily.

The first glimpse of a far-away mountain brought the surprising tears to his eyes. It was an inconsiderable ridge with an outline of no distinction, but it had the old charm, the power of clutching at his heart and dragging it up from the glories and sorrows of the sea. Raven always insisted that he loved the sea best, with its terrors and multitudinous activities; but the mountains did pull him up somewhere into a region he did not inhabit all the time. He had an idea that this was simply a plane of physical exhilaration; but it didn't matter. It was an easement of a sort, if only the difference of change. When he stepped out of the train at Wake Hill he was in a tranquil frame of mind, and the more the minute he saw Jerry Slate there in the pung, enveloped in the buffalo coat he had worn through the winter months ever since he attained his present height. Jerry was a typical man of Wake Hill. He was ten years, at least, older than Raven and had lived here, man and boy, all his life, and his wife, Charlotte, was the presiding benevolence of the Raven home. Seeing his passenger, he lifted his whip-stock in salute and stepped out of the pung to meet him. Jerry was yellow and freckled and blue-eyed, with a face, Raven always thought, like a baked apple. It had still a rosy bloom, but the puckers overspread it, precisely like an apple's after fervent heat. They shook hands, Jerry having extracted a gnarled member from his mitten.

"You take a look an' see 'f your trunk's come," he recommended, restoring his hand to its beautifully knit sheath. "You're better acquainted with the looks on't than I be. There 'tis now. Anyways it's the only one there."

It was Raven's own, and he and Jerry lifted it into the back of the pung, and were presently jogging temperately homeward. Jerry never had horses with any go in them. In the old days, when Raven used to come to the farm with his mother, he would write Jerry to see that he had a horse.

"Get me a horse," he would write, "a horse, a horse, with four feet and a mane and tail. Not a wooden freak out of Noah's ark, whittled out with a jack-knife, such as I had last year. Get me a horse."

And he would arrive to find some aged specimen, raw-boned and indifferent, waiting for him in the stable. And Jerry would slap the creature's haunches with a fictitious jollity and prophesy, the while he kept an anxious eye on Raven, "I guess he'll suit ye all right."

He never did suit. He had to be swapped off or, as it happened once or twice, given away, and yet Raven was obtuse to the real reason until Charlotte enlightened him. She took him aside, one day in the autumn, when he and his mother were going back to town.

"I guess if you want any horses next spring," she said, with one eye on the door where Jerry might appear, "you better fetch 'em along with you."

"Why, yes," said Raven, "of course I can. Only I had an idea Jerry liked to do the buying for the place."

"Not horses," said Charlotte firmly. "Jerry's a peculiar sort of man. They know it an' they kinder take advantage of him. I dunno why."

Then Raven realized that Charlotte herself was responsible for his faith in Jerry's bargaining prowess. She had hypnotized him into considering Jerry a great fellow at a trade as at everything else manly and invincible. She was watching him now with a doubtful and anxious eye.

"No," she repeated, "I dunno why."

"No," said Raven, "I don't know why either. But I'll look out for it." At that instant he understood her way with Jerry and loved her for it. She was tall and heavy-browed and dark, with warm, brown tints of eyes and skin, and seven times the man Jerry was, but it was her passionate intent to hold him supreme at home and market.

Meantime they were jingling along, with a chill clashing of bells, and Raven had heard all about the prospects of an open winter and the difficulties of ice-cutting, and he gathered that Jerry and Charlotte were extremely pleased to have him come.

"Didn't know's we should ever set eyes on ye ag'in," said Jerry, with an innocuous flick of his whiplash, hitting the dasher by intent. "That War an' all."

Raven thought he detected in his tone a general hostility to the War as a disturber even of Wake Hill, and wondered if he should have to fight it all over again with the imperfectly satisfied ideals of Jerry and Charlotte. But Jerry laid that bogey to rest.

"Not that I wouldn't ha' had ye go," he announced. "I'd ha' gone myself if I hadn't been a leetle mite over age. I dunno but I could ha' been some use as 'twas. I'm spry for my years. I never so much as thought you'd git into it. Charlotte an' I were talkin' it over last night, an' she says, 'He's forty-three, if he's a day.' How old be you?"

"Forty-five," said Raven. "I wasn't in the trenches, you know. Ambulance Corps."

"Sho!" said Jerry. "Never come nigh the fightin' line, I s'pose."

"Sometimes," said Raven, smiling a little to himself. "But the boys in the trenches, you know, they're the ones that did the business. I suppose the Hamilton house was closed all summer?"

Jerry gave him a quick look and then took off a mitten to pass his hand across his mouth. Raven knew what the look meant. It meant Anne Hamilton: how had her death affected him? would he ask about her? and the mild inquisitive neighborhood mind would go back to the old question it had probably dropped and taken up intermittently for years: why, in their curious intimacy, had he never married her?

"Yes," said Jerry, "all summer. Little Nan was over there, too, where you were, I understood."

"Yes, she was over there. She's home now."

"You knew her aunt died?" said Jerry speciously. It was foolish, he knew it was foolish, and yet he could not, in his craving for some amplification of the fact, help saying it.

"Yes," said Raven, "I knew it."

There the topic died. They were passing the last stretch of woods that fringed the road before Raven's own house. Up on that slope at the right, draped about by a dense woodland, occasional patches of pines girdled by birch and maple, was the hut where Old Crow had lived. A logging road came down from the ridge, and Raven saw with interest that it had been broken out.

"Chopping?" he asked, Jerry following his glance to the ascending road.

Jerry grinned and clucked to the horse. He looked well satisfied with himself.

"No," he said. "But the minute you wrote you was comin', I yoked up the oxen an' broke her out. Charlotte said you'd want to be goin' up there."

Raven laughed. It was funny, too grimly funny. Even Charlotte and Jerry were pushing him on up the rise to Old Crow's hut. Dick had begun it and they were adding the impulse of their kindly forethought.

"Yes," he said, "I shall. I'll go up at once." ("And have it over!" his mind cynically added.)

They were descending the last slope and the mild-mannered horse caught the idea of stables and put on a gait. Raven could see the house, delightful to him in its hospitable amplitude and starkly fitting the wintry landscape. There in the columned front porch running away at each side into wide verandas, stood a woman, tall, of proportions that looked, at this first glance, heroic. She wore a shawl about her shoulders, but her head was bare.

"There she is," said Jerry, with an evident pride in so splendid a fact. "I tell her she never can wait a minute to let anybody turn round."

It was true. Charlotte could not wait. She began to wave—no short, staccato, pump-handle wave, but a sweep indicative of breadth, like the horizon line. Raven, while they were jingling up to the house, took one more look at it, recognizing, with a surprise that was almost poignant, how much it meant to him. He might not be glad to get back to it—in his present state of disaffection he could not believe there was a spot on earth he should be glad to see—but it touched the chord of old memories and his eyes were hot with the assault of it. A square house with many additions, so that it rambled comfortably away, threaded over at advantageous points by leafless lines of woodbine and bitter-sweet and murmured over by a great grove of pines at the west: his roots of life were here, he recognized, with a renewed pang of surprise. He was not used to thinking about himself. Now that the changed bias of his mind had bred new habits, he was thinking a great deal.

They stopped at the porch and Charlotte came down to them, stepping lightly yet with deliberation. Raven knew she probably moved slowly because she was so heavy, but it gave the effect of majesty walking. She was unchanged, he thought, as he grasped her firm hand: her smooth brown hair was as thick, her healthy face unlined. When he touched Charlotte he always felt as if he touched the earth itself. Her hand was the hand of earth, ready to lead you to wholesome and satisfying things.

"Well," said she, "if I ain't pleased to see you! Jerry, you goin' to take the trunk in this way?"

Jerry gave her a quick look of inquiry. They had subtle modes of communication. Charlotte could command him by the flicker of an eyelash or a modulation of tone, so that Jerry seemed, in the resultant act, to be following only his own careless or deliberate will.

"Yep," said he, "I'll see to her."

Raven laid hold of it with him and they carried it upstairs to the great front room looking out to the eastern sky. And Raven was again moved, as he went, by another surprising discovery: Charlotte had tears in her eyes. He had at all times a moderate estimate of his own value in the world, his own appeal to it. Perhaps that was one reason, aside from the natural sex revulsion, why Anne's exaggerated fostering had roused in him that wearied perversity. But it was warming to see Charlotte glad enough to cry over him. When they had set down the trunk and the two had gone downstairs, he looked about the room and found it good. The walls were chiefly paneling, all but some expanses of a rich rose and blue paper; the hangings were of a delicious blue, and a roaring fire was making great headway. He could guess Charlotte had timed that birch log, relative to their approach, for the curling bark had not yet blackened and the fat chuckle of it was still insistent. He laughed a little at himself. He might have repudiated the scheme of creation and his own place in it, but he did love things: dear, homespun, familiar things, potent to eke out man's well-being with their own benevolence and make him temporarily content in an inhospitable world.

When he went downstairs, the smells from the kitchen were something overwhelming in their rich pervasiveness. He went directly in where Charlotte bent at the oven door for a frowning inspection and a resultant basting.

"Yes," she said, glancing up, "turkey. Terry set him aside, sort of—he was so well formed and had such nice, pretty ways. Jerry said we'd have him first time you come. He's always be'n a terrible nice turkey."

Raven had seen his place laid in the dining-room with bravery of damask and old china.

"I'm not going to eat alone," he said. "I couldn't face a whole turkey. You and Jerry come on in and back me up. You set on two more plates."

"Oh, no," said Charlotte, closing the oven door and rising. "I guess I'll give him a minute longer. No. It's real nice of you, but we couldn't. Jerry never would in the world."

"Jerry be hanged!" said Raven. He wandered into the pantry and began helping himself to the celery waiting by the cool window-pane. "Tell him it's all decided. Jerry's got to do what we say."

"If that ain't just like you," said Charlotte, with what seemed a pride in his knowing ways. "Eatin' up the celery an' all, the minute 'fore dinner, too. I wonder you don't pry into the cooky jar."

"I will, now you mention it," said Raven, bending to it where it lurked, with its secretive look, under the lower shelf. He lifted the cover with an involuntary care. He had been there so often when he wanted a handful of cookies and knew, if he clinked the cover, he might hear his father's voice from the dining-room where he sat reading his paper: "What are you doing out there?" The cookies were waiting for him, unchanged, as if there were an everlasting pattern of cookies and you couldn't get away from it: oak-leaf, discreetly specked with caraway. "Hurry up," said he, coming out to Charlotte with his clutch of oak-leaves. "Put on your plate and Jerry's or the turkey'll be done before you know it."

Charlotte glanced round at him, absently took the cookies from his hand, as if he were a child whose greed must be regulated, and laid them in a plate on the table.

"Don't you spoil your appetite," she said, still absently, for her mind was with the turkey. "Well, I'll go an' ask Jerry. I don't believe he'll feel to. Miss Anne——"

Raven was sure he heard the last two words as she made her light way out into the shed in a fictitious search for Jerry. He stood staring after her and wondering. It was inconceivable that Anne, by sheer force of a mind absolutely convinced of its own rightness, should have had such a grip on everybody she came in contact with. It had been Anne's house next door. She had spent her summers in it, and even Charlotte had imbibed through its walls the pronouncements of a social code. Anne was dead, but when Charlotte and Jerry were asked to sit down to turkey with their employer and familiar friend, it was Anne's unforgotten ideal that rose before her, the illuminated copy of the social code in its rigid hand. As he stood, he saw Jerry pulling the pung under a shed at the back of the barn. He knew Charlotte hadn't seen him, didn't intend to take the time to see him, but would presently be back with Jerry's ultimatum. That was her system. She implicitly followed Jerry's command, a command she had already put into his mouth. It was so accepted a part of the household routine that he had ceased to think of it as in the least unusual. She was back again almost at once.

"Jerry says he'd be happy to, to-day," she announced, "so long's as he ain't changed back into his barn clo'es. We'll be kinder company. But after this, he says, we'll begin as usual."

So presently they sat down together to the crackly brown turkey and Raven carved and fought off Charlotte, who rose from her place in a majestic authority which seemed the highest decorum to take the fork and pick out titbits for his plate, and they talked of countryside affairs, but never, Raven was grateful to notice, of his absence or of France. Once Jerry did begin a question relative to "them long range guns," but Charlotte bore him down before Raven could lay hold of the question, even if he had been eager for it.

"Jerry's forbid me to ask you the leastest thing about how 'twas over there," she said smoothly, without a look at Jerry, but a direct intention that was like a swift secret communication between them, a line not even to be tapped. "He says, 'We won't say one word about what Mr. Raven's been through, not if he begins to talk about it himself. He's been through enough,' says he. 'Now le's let him turn his mind to suthin' else.'"

"Yes," said Jerry boldly, "I guess that's pretty nigh what I said—what I'd say now, anyways."

Raven smiled a little inwardly, as he often did at "Mr. Raven." He and Jerry and Charlotte had been neighbors, and he, being younger, was always "young John" to them, and sometimes, in excess of friendliness or exhortation, "Jack." He wondered if it had been the social idealism of Anne that had made them attain the proper title, or if, when the crust of renewed convention broke through, they would, under the stress of common activities, flounder about as they did before he went away, in an intermittent familiarity.

"All the houses shut up," he said, "the summer houses?"

"Yes," said Charlotte, eating her wing delicately, perhaps with a thought of Anne. "City folks all gone. Went early this year, too. Wood's so high now, if they ain't cut their own they don't seem to want to lay in. Jerry says they'd ought to think further ahead."

"Yes," said Jerry, with his mechanical acquiescence, "they'd ought to think further ahead."

"Who's bought the old Frye place?" asked Raven. "Or is it empty?"

"No," said Charlotte, "it ain't empty. I dunno's you remember the Tenneys that used to live over the mountain, what they call Mountain Brook. Kind of a shif'less lot they were. Some of 'em drinked."

"Why, yes," said Raven, "I remember 'em. The boys used to do a lot of trapping. One of 'em—what was his name? Israel, yes, that's it. Israel—he seemed to be of a different stripe. Used to work out. Seemed to want to make something of himself."

"That's him," said Charlotte. "Well, he's bought the Frye place."

"Married?"

"Yes, he married a girl over there, at Mountain Brook. He'd been away years an' years, sence he was a growin' boy, an' he come back, an' seems he had money laid up, an' he bought the Frye farm an' went straight off over to Mountain Brook an' hunted her up an' married her. She used to have folks, but they've all moved away. Seems if he'd had her in mind all the time. Kind o' that way, he is, lays his fires a good while beforehand."

"Nice girl?" Raven inquired.

Charlotte hesitated. Her brown cheek flushed.

"Well," she said, "I never've heard anything ag'inst her, not anything I should be willin' to repeat. You know what they be, there over the mountain. There's the Donnyhills. Good folks, but shif'less! my soul! Though she ain't that."

"Called on her, haven't you?"

"No," said Charlotte. She wore the flush of resentful matronhood. "I was goin' to. I started, one afternoon. An' after I'd knocked, I heard him jawin'. Well! You never heard a man talk so in all your life. I never did, anyways! twittin' her with everything under the sun."

"Nice for you," said Raven, "butting in on a row."

"I didn't butt in," said Charlotte. "I turned round an' come straight home. An' the next day they rode by, as budge as you please, she with the baby in her lap. Baby had on a nice white coat. I didn't go ag'in. I didn't feel to."

Then Raven, seeing that Jerry had regretfully but inevitably laid down his knife and fork, as one who can no more, relinquished the Tenneys, and there was a period of that silence so blessed among intimates, and Charlotte brought in the pudding. And after dinner, while she washed the dishes, Raven sat in the kitchen and smoked a pipe with Jerry and thought intermittently, in the inmost cell of his most secret mind, about the blessed beauties of things. Here they were all about him, inherited treasures of memory, some of them homely and of little value, many of them far less convenient than the appliances of the present day. He even thought he recognized ancient utensils, as Charlotte washed them, the great iron spider where crullers were fried—always with a few cut in hands with straight fat fingers, to suit a boyish fancy—and the colander he had once been found utilizing as a helmet in a play of chivalry. Such smells came out of this kitchen, like no other smells in any house he knew. The outlines of things, the tints of time and use! There was the red door into the buttery, where once, when he was a little boy, he had caught for a few minutes only an enchanting glow from the setting sun. Sunrise and rubies and roses: none of them had ever equaled the western light on the old red paint. Over and over again he had tried to recall the magic, to set the door at the precise angle to catch the level rays, but in vain. It was a moment of beauty, fleeting as the sunset itself, and only to be found in the one permanence that is memory. He remembered it now with a thousand other impressions as lasting and as lost, and childhood and youth came alive in him and hurt and helped him. Yes, this was home. In a hostile universe there was one spot where he and the past could safely rest.

VIII

Raven went to sleep thinking simply about the house, while the fire flickered down on the hearth and shadows all about the room flickered with it and then went out. He always loved shadows, their beauties and grotesqueries, and he was unfeignedly glad he had no scientific understanding of them, why they played this way or that and translated the substance that made them so delicately and sometimes with such an adorable foolishness. He liked it better that way, liked to make out of them a game of surprises and pretend they were in good form and doing particularly well, or again far below their highest. And following his childishly enchanting game he began to feel rather abashed over what had brought him here. He was glad to have come. It was the only place for him, disordered as he was, with its wholesome calm, and he wondered further if the state of mind that had become habitual to him was now a state of mind at all. Was it not rather a temporary drop in mental temperature now calming to normal? Hadn't he exaggerated the complication of Anne's bequest? There was a way out of it; there must be, a sane, practical way to satisfy what she wished and what she might be supposed to wish now. He comforted himself with the pious sophistry of an Anne raised on the wind of death above early inconclusions and so, of course, agreeing with him who didn't have to pass the gates of mystery to be so raised. He knew enough, evidently, so that he didn't need to die to know more. His letter to Dick seemed of inconsiderable importance, even the disaster of its reaching Amelia. If she held him up to it, he could laugh it off. Anything could be laughed off. So, the shadows mingling with the inconsequence of his thoughts, he drifted away to sleep, catching himself back, now and then, to luxuriate in the assurance that he was in the right place, finding comfortable assuagements, and that inexplicably, because so suddenly, everything was for the best in a mysterious but probably entirely unaccountable world.

At four o'clock he woke. He had not for a moment last night expected this. Four o'clock had been for months the hour of his tryst with the powers of darkness. They hovered over him then with dull grey wings extended, from sunrise to sunset, from east to west. He never had the courage to peer up at them and see how far the wings really did reach. They covered his mortal sky, and when he refused to stare up into their leaden pinions, they stooped to him and buffeted and smothered him, until he was such a mass of bruised suffering within that he could almost believe his body also was quivering into the numbness of acquiescent misery. And here were the wings again. They were even lower, in spite of this clear air. They did not merely shut it out from his nostrils, but the filthy pinions swept his face and roused in him the uttermost revulsion of mortal man against the accident of his mortality. The trouble of earth passed before him in its unceasing panorama, a pageant of pain and death. Every atom of creation was against every other atom, because everywhere was warfare, murder and rapine, for the mere chance of living. He had won his inherited chance by sheer luck of contest through millions of years while his forebears came up from the slime and the cave. The little hunted creature, shrieking out there in the wood in the clutch of a predatory enemy was not so lucky. It was the enemy who was lucky to-night, but to-morrow night the enemy himself might go down under longer claws and be torn by fangs stronger than his own. And God had made it so. And God did not care.

Raven lay there panting under the horror of it. The sweat started on his skin. He was afraid. It was not his own well-being he feared for. Man's life was short at the most. A few years might finish him up. It was unlikely that he need live again. But he feared seeing still more of the acts of this unmindful God, who could make, and set the wheel of being to turning and then stand aside and let them grind out their immeasurable grist of woe. And when he asked himself how he knew God was standing aside, letting the days and years fulfil their sum, he believed it was because he had suddenly become aware that time was a boundless sea and that the human soul was sometimes in the trough of it and sometimes on the crest. But never would the sea cast its derelicts upon warm shores where they might build the house of life and live in peace and innocence. Ever would they find themselves tossed from low to high and fall from high to low again in the salt wash of the retreating wave. For after all, it was the mysterious sea God had a mind to, never the derelict atoms afloat on it. They would have to take sea weather to time's extremest verge, as they always had taken it. They were derelicts.

As the light came, the leaden wings lifted and he went down to the early breakfast Charlotte and Jerry intended to eat alone. Charlotte, with her good morning, gave him a quick glance. He found she had not expected him so early and knew she saw at once how harassed he was. He insisted on sitting down to breakfast with them and, after Jerry had gone out, went over the house in a mindless way, into all the rooms, to give himself something to do. Also there seemed to be a propriety in it, a fittingness in presenting himself to his own walls and accepting their silent recognition. Then, hearing Charlotte upstairs, he went back into the kitchen, as straight as if he had meant to go there all the time and had merely idled on these delaying quests, and up to the nail by the shed door where the key always hung, the key to Old Crow's hut. He took it off the nail, dropped it in his pocket, got a leather jacket from the hall and went out into the road. As he went, he heard Jerry moving about in the barn and walked the faster, not to be halted or offered friendly company. At the great maples he paused, two of them marking the entrance to the wood road, and looked about him. The world was resolutely still. The snow was not deep, but none of it had melted. It was of a uniform whiteness and luster and the shadows in it were deeply blue. There were tracks frozen into it all along the road, many of them old ones, others just broken, the story of some animal's wandering. Then he turned into the wood road and began to climb the rise, and as he went he was conscious of an unaccountable excitement. Dick was responsible for that, he told himself. Dick had waked his mind to old memories. This was, in effect, and all owing to Dick, a tryst with Old Crow.

He remembered every step of the way, what he might find if he could sweep off the snow or wait until June and let the mounting sun sweep it according to its own method. Here at the right would be the great patch of clintonia. Further in at the left was tiarella, with its darling leaf, and along under the yellow birches the lady's slipper he had transplanted, year after year, and that finally took root and showed a fine sturdiness he had never seen exceeded elsewhere. He went on musing over the permanence of things and the mutability of mortal joy, wondering if, in this world He had made without remedies for its native ills, God could take pleasure in the bleak framework of it. And when he had nearly reached the top of the slope, the three firs, where a turn to the left would bring him to the log cabin door, suddenly he stopped as if his inner self heard the command to halt. He looked about him, and his heart began to beat hard. But he was not surprised. What could be more moving than the winter stillness of the woods in a spot all memories? Yet he was in no welcoming mood for high emotion, and looking up and about, to shake off the wood magic, there at a little distance at his right, between pine boles, he saw her, the woman. She was tall and slender, yet grandly formed. A blue cloak was wrapped about her and her head was bare. Her face had a gaunt beauty such as he had never seen. The eyes, richly blue but darkened by the startled pupil, were bewildering in their soft yet steady appealingness. Her hair was parted and carried back in waves extraordinarily thick and probably knotted behind. That, of course, he could not see. But the little soft rings of it about her forehead he noted absently. And her look was so full of dramatic tension, of patient, noble gravity, even grief, that one phrase flashed into his mind, "The Mother of Sorrows!" and stayed there. So moving was her face that, although he had at the first instant taken in her entire outline, the significance of it had not struck him until now. On her arm, in the immemorial mother's fashion, she carried a child. The child was in white and a blue scarf was tied about his head. When Raven saw the scarf, his tension relaxed. There was something about the scarf that was real, was earthly: a ragged break in one free corner. In the relief of seeing the break, and being thus brought back to tangible things, he realized that he had, in a perfect seriousness, for one amazing minute, believed the woman and the child to be not human but divine. They were, as they struck upon his eyes, a vision, and he would have been in no sense surprised to see the vision fade. It was the Virgin Mary and her Son. Now, as he realized with the lightning rapidity of a morbidly excited mind how terribly sensitive to his own needs he must be to have clutched so irrationally at a world-old remedy, he took off his hat and called to her:

"You startled me."

Without waiting for any response, he turned to the left, because the probabilities were that he had startled her also, and that was why she had stood there, petrified into the catalepsy of wood animals struck by cautionary fear. But, as he turned, a man's voice sounded through the woods, and waked an echo:

"Hullo!" it called. "Hullo!"

Raven involuntarily paused, and saw the woman running toward him. There were stumps in her way, but she stepped over them lightly, and once, when she had to cross a hollow where the snow lay deep, she sank in up to her knees, and Raven involuntarily stepped forward to help her. But she freed herself with incredible quickness and came on. It might have been water she was wading in, so little did it check her. She halted before him, only a pace away, as if she must be near in order to speak cautiously, and Raven noted the exquisite texture of her pale skin and the pathos of her eyes, the pupils distended now so that he wondered if they could be blue. Meantime the voice kept on calling, "Hullo! hullo!"

She spoke tremulously, in haste:

"He'll be up here in a minute. You say you ain't seen me."

"Is it some one you're afraid of?" Raven asked.

She nodded, in a dumb anguish.

"Then," said he, "we'll both stay here till he comes, and afterward I'll go with you, wherever you're going."

This, it seemed, moved her to a terror more acute.

"No! no!" she said, and she appeared to have so little breath to say it that, if he had not been watching her lips, he could not have caught it. "Not you. That would make him madder'n ever. You go away. Hide you somewheres, quick."

"No," said Raven, "I sha'n't hide. I'll hide you. Come along."

He took her by the arm and, though she was remonstrating breathlessly, hurried her to the left. They passed the three firs at the turn and he smiled a little, noting Jerry's good road and thinking there was some use in this combined insistence on his following the steps of Old Crow. There was the hut, in its rough kindliness, and there, the smoke told him, was a fire. Jerry had been up that morning, because Charlotte must have known he'd come there the first thing. Still smoothing the road to Old Crow! He had been fumbling with one hand for the key, the while he kept the other on her arm. She was so terrified a creature now that he did not trust her not to break blindly away and run. He unlocked the door, pushed her in, closed and locked it. Then he dropped the key in his pocket and went back to the wood road. With a sudden thought, he took his knife from his pocket and tossed it down the road into a little heap of brush. Meanwhile the man was coming nearer and, as he came, he called: "Hullo!"

Raven, waiting for him, speculated on the tone. What did it mean? It was a breathless tone, though not in any manner like the woman's. It was as if he had run and stumbled and caught himself up, and all the time been strangled from within by rage or some like madness. The woman's breathlessness had simply meant life's going out of her with sheer fright. Now the man was coming up the slope, bent at the shoulders, as if he carried a heavy load or as if almost doubling himself helped him to go the faster. He was a thin man with long arms and he carried an axe. Raven called to him:

"Hullo, there! Take a look as you come along and see if you can find my knife."

The man stopped short, straightened, and looked at him. Meantime Raven, bending in his search, went toward him, scrutinizing the road from side to side. He had a good idea of the fellow in the one glance he gave him: a pale, thin face, black eyes with a strange spark in them, a burning glance like the inventor's or the fanatic's, and black hair. It was an ascetic face, and yet there was passion of an unnamed sort ready to flash out and do strange things, overthrow the fabric of an ordered life perhaps, or contradict the restraint of years. He stood motionless until Raven, still searching, had got within three feet of him. Then he spoke:

"Who be you?"

He had a low voice, agreeable, even musical. Raven concluded he must have been strangely moved to break into that mad "Hullo." It had been more, he thought, that wild repetition with the echo throwing it back, like the Gabriel hounds. But Raven took no notice of the question. He spoke with a calculated peevishness.

"I'm willing to bet my knife is within three feet, and see how the confounded thing's hidden itself. It was right along here. Let me take your axe and I'll blaze a tree."

The man, without a word, passed him the axe and Raven notched a sapling. Then, still holding the axe, he turned to the man with a smile. No one had ever told him what a charming smile it was. Anne used to wonder, in her dignified anguishes of love forbidden, if she could ever make him understand how he looked when he smiled.

"Well," said Raven, "who may you be?"

"My name's Tenney," said the man, in the low, vibrant voice.

"Oho!" said Raven, remembering Charlotte's confidences. Then, as Tenney frowned slightly and glanced at him in a questioning suspicion, he continued, "Then we're neighbors. My name's Raven."

The man nodded.

"They said you were comin'," he remarked.

He held out his hand for the axe. Raven, loath to give it to him, yet saw no excuse for withholding it. After all, she was safely locked in. So he tossed the axe and Tenney caught it lightly, and was turning away. But he stopped, considered a moment, looking down at the ground, and then, evidently concluding the question had to be put, broke out, and, Raven thought, shamefacedly:

"You seen anything of her up here?"

"Her?" Raven repeated, though he knew the country shyness over family terms.

"Yes. My woman."

"Your wife?" insisted Raven. "I don't believe I know her. No, I'm sure I don't. I've been away several years. On the road, you mean? No—not a soul."

A swift rage passed over Tenney's face. It licked it like a flash of evil light and Raven thought he saw how dangerous he could be.

"No," he said, "I don't mean on the road. I mean in the woods."

"Up here?" persisted Raven. "No, certainly not. This is no place for a woman. A woman would have to be off her head to come traipsing up here in the snow. Is that what you were yelling about? I thought you were a catamount, at least."

He laughed. He had an idea, suddenly conceived, that the man, having a keen sense of personal dignity, was subject to ridicule, and that a laugh would be salutary for him. And he was right. Tenney straightened, put his axe over his shoulder, and walked away down the hill.

IX

Raven stood looking after him a minute and then began an ostentatious search for his knife, went to the little pile of brush and saw it—the steel tip of the handle shining there—and pulled the brush aside to get it. As he was rising with it in his hand, he saw Tenney turn and look back at him. He held up the knife and called:

"I've got it."

Tenney, not answering even by a sign, went on over the rise and disappeared below. Then Raven, after lingering a little to make sure he did not reappear, turned up the slope and into the path at the left and so came again to the hut. He unlocked the door and went in. She was sitting by the fire and the child was on the floor, staring rather vacuously at his little fingers, as if they interested him, but not much. The woman was looking at the child, but only in a mechanical sort of way, as if it were her job to look and she did it without intention even when the child was safe. But she was also watching the door, waiting for him; it was in an agony of expectation, and her eyes questioned him the instant he stepped in.

"Warm enough?" he inquired, as incidentally, he hoped, as if it were not unusual to find her here. "Let me throw on a log."

He did throw on two and the fire answered. The solemn child, who proved, at closer view, to have an unusual beauty of pink cheeks, blue eyes, and reddish hair, did not intermit his serious gaze at his fingers. When Raven had put on the logs and dusted himself off, he found himself at a loss. How should he begin? Was Tenney, with his catamount yells and his axe, to be ignored altogether, or should he reassure her by telling her the man had gone? But she herself began.

"I suppose," she said, in the eloquent low voice that seemed to make the smallest word significant, "you think it's funny."

Raven knew what sense the word was meant to convey.

"No," he said, "not in the least. It's pretty bad for you, though," he added gravely, on second thought that he might.

She made a little gesture with her hand. It was a beautifully formed hand, but reddened with work. The gesture was as if she threw something away.

"He won't hurt me," she said.

"No," Raven returned, "I should hope not."

He drew up a chair to the hearth and was about to take it when she spoke again. The blood ran into her cheeks, as she did it, and she put her request with difficulty. It seemed to Raven that she was suddenly engulfed in shame.

"Should you just as soon," she asked, "take the key inside an' lock the door?"

She put it humbly, and Raven rose at once.

"Of course," he said. "Good idea."

He locked the door and came back to his chair and she began, never omitting to share her attention with the child:

"I know who you be. It's too bad this has come upon you. I'll have to ask you not to let it go any further."

Raven was about to assure her that nothing had come upon him, and then he bethought himself that a great deal had. She had looked to him like the Mother of Sorrows and, though the shock of that vision was over, she seemed to him now scarcely less touching in her beautiful maternity and her undefended state. So he only glanced at her and said gravely:

"Nobody will know anything about it from me. After all"—he was bound to reassure her if he could—"I've nothing to tell."

Her face flashed into an intensity of revolt against any subterfuge, the matter was so terrible.

"Why, yes, you have," said she. "Isr'el Tenney chased his woman up into the woods with an axe. An' you heard him yellin' after her. That's God's truth."

Raven felt rising in him the rage of the natural man, a passion of protection for the woman who is invincibly beautiful yet physically weak.

"An'," she went on, "you might ha' seen him out there, axe an' all."

"Oh," said Raven, as if it were of no great account, "I did see him."

"O my soul!" she breathed. "You see him? I'm glad you come in. He might ha' asked you if you'd seen me."

"He did."

This was a new terror and she was undone.

"How'd you do it?" she asked breathlessly. "You must ha' put it better'n I could or he'd be here now."

"I didn't 'put it,'" said Raven, easily. "I lied, and he went off down the hill."

Extravagant as it seemed, he did get an impression, like a flash, that she was disappointed in him because he had lied. But this was no time for casuistry. There were steps to be taken.

"You won't go back to him," he said, and said it definitively as if it were a matter he had thought out, said it like a command.

She stared at him.

"Not go back to him?" she repeated. "Why, I've got to go back to him. I've got to go home. Where do you expect I'm goin', if I don't go home?"

"Haven't you any people?" Raven asked her. "Can't you go to them?"

She laughed a little, softly, showing fine white teeth. The spell of her beauty was moving to him. He might never, he thought, have noticed her at all in other circumstances, if he had not seen her there in the woods and felt her need knock at his heart with the imperative summons of the outraged maternal. Was this the feeling rising in him that had made his mother's servitude to his father so sickening in those years gone by? Was the old string still throbbing? Did it need but a woman's hand to play upon it? And yet must he not have noted her, wherever they had met? Would not any man?

"I've got four brothers," she said. "They'd laugh at me. They'd tell me I'd married well an' got a better home than any of them could scrape together if they begun at the beginnin' an' lived their lives over. There's nothin' in Isr'el Tenney to be afraid of, they'd tell me. And there ain't—for them."

"No," said Raven quietly. He felt an intense desire to feel his way, make no mistakes, run no risk of shutting off her confidence. "It's a different thing for you."

Now she turned her face more fully upon him, in a challenging surprise.

"Why," she said, "I ain't afraid—except for him."

By the smallest motion of her hand she indicated the child, who was now, in sudden sleepiness, toppling back against the wall.

"Put him up here," said Raven, indicating the couch.

He opened the folded rug and held it until she had disposed the little lax figure among the pillows. Then she took the rug from him and covered the child, with quick, capable movements of her beautiful worn hands. Raven, watching her, felt a clutch at his throat. Surely there was nothing in the known world of plastic action so wonderful as these movements of mothers' hands in their work of easing a child. With a last quick touch on the rug, drawing it slightly away from the baby cheek, she returned to her chair, and Raven again took his. He was afraid lest she repent her open-mindedness toward him and talk no more. But she was looking at him earnestly. It was evidently a part of her precautionary foresight that he should know. Did she think he could help her? His blood quickened at the thought. It seemed enough to have lived for, in so brutal a world. She veered for a moment from her terror to the necessity for justifying herself.

"You needn't think," she said, almost aggressively, "I'd talk to everybody like this."

He was holding himself down to a moderation he knew she wanted, and replied:

"No, of course not. But you can talk to me."

"Yes," she said, "I can." She dismissed that, having said it, as if she saw no need of finding the underlying reasons they were both going by. "You see," she said, "it's the baby. When he gits one o' them spells, it's the baby he pitches on."

Raven picked out from her confusion of pronouns the fact that Tenney, in his spells, incredibly threatened the baby.

"Don't you think," he said, "you make too much of it—I mean, as to the baby. He wouldn't hurt his own child."

Again the blood ran into her cheeks, and she looked a suffering so acute that Raven got up and walked through the room to the window. It seemed an indecency to scan the anguished page of her face.

"That's it," she said, in a strangled voice. "When he has his spells he don't believe the baby's his."

"God!" muttered Raven. He turned and came back to her. "You don't mean to live with him," he said. "You can't. You mustn't. The man's a brute."

She was looking up at him proudly.

"But," she said, "baby is his own child."

"Good God! of course it is," broke out Raven, in a fever of impatience. "Of course it's his child. You don't need to tell me that."

Then, incredibly, she smiled and two dimples appeared at the corners of her mouth and altered her face from a mask of tragic suffering to the sweetest playfulness.

"You mustn't say 'it,'" she reproved him. "You must say 'he.' Anybody'd know you ain't a family man."

Raven stood looking at her a moment, his own smile coming. Then he sat down in his chair. He wanted to tell her how game she was, and there seemed no way to manage it. But now he could ask her questions. Her friendliness, her amazing confidence, had opened the door.

"Exactly what do you mean?" he asked, yet cautiously, for even after her own avowals he might frighten her off the bough. "Does he drink?"

She looked at him reprovingly.

"No, indeed," she said. "He's a very religious man."

"The devil he is!" Raven found himself muttering, remembering the catamount yells and the axe. "Then what," he continued, with as complete an air as he could manage of taking it as all in the day's work, "what do you mean by his spells?"

She was silent a moment. Her mind seemed to be going back.

"He gits—mad," she said slowly. "Crazy, kind of. It's when he looks at baby and baby looks different to him."

"Different? How different?"

"Why," she said, in a burst of pride turning for an instant to the little figure on the couch, "baby's got awful cunnin' little ways. An' he's got a little way o' lookin' up sideways, kind o' droll, an' when he does that an' Mr. Tenney sees it"—here Raven glanced at her quickly, wondering what accounted for her being so scrupulous with her "Mr. Tenney"—"he can't help noticin' it an' he can't help thinkin' how baby ain't colored like either of us—we're both dark——"

There she stopped, at last in irreparable confusion, and Raven was relieved. How could he let her, he had been thinking, go on with the sordid revelation? When he spoke, it was more to himself than to her, but conclusively:

"The man's a beast."

"No, he ain't," said she indignantly. "Baby's light complected. You see he is. An' I'm dark an' so's Mr. Tenney. An' I told him—I told him about me before we were married, an' he thought he could stand it then. But we went over to the county fair an' he see—him. He come up an' spoke to him, that man did, spoke to us both, an' Mr. Tenney looked at him as if he never meant to forgit him, an' he ain't forgot him, not a minute since. He's light complected, blue eyes an' all. An' he stood there, that man did, talkin' to us, kinder laughin' an' bein' funny, an' all to scare me out o' my life for fear o' what he'd say. He didn't say a word he hadn't ought to, an' when he'd had his joke he walked off. But he had just that way o' lookin' up kinder droll, an' baby's got it. Mr. Raven, for God's sake tell me why my baby's got to look like that man?"

She was shaking him into a passion as unendurable as her own. He had never felt such pity for any human being, not even the men blinded and broken in the War. And he understood her now. Even through his belief in her, that sudden belief born of her beauty and her extremity, he had been amazed at her accepting him so absolutely. Now he saw. He was her last hope and perhaps because he was different from the neighbors to whom she could not speak, she was throwing herself into the arms of his compassion. And she had to hurry lest she might not see him again. He sat there, his hands clenched between his knees, his head bent. He must not look at her.

"Poor chap!" he said finally, his altered thoughts now on Tenney. "He's jealous."

She broke into a sob that seemed to rend her and then pulled herself up and sat silent. But he could see, from her shadowy outline through his oblique vision, that she was shaking horribly.

"Can't you," he said, "make him understand, make him see how—how tremendously you love him?"

That was pretty mawkish, he thought, as he said it, but he meant it, he meant volumes more. Flood the man with kindness, open the doors of her beauty and let him see how really incorruptible she was, how loyal, how wronged. For, with every minute of her company, he was the more convinced of her inviolate self. Whatever the self had been through, now it was motherhood incarnate. What was she saying to this last?

"Be nice to him?" she asked, "that kind o' way?" And he saw, as she did, that he had meant her to drown the man's jealous passion in passion of her own. "He thinks," she said bitterly, "that's the kind o' woman I am."

Then he looked with her upon the barricaded road of her endeavor.

"I can't even," she said, "have the house pretty when he comes home an' be dressed up so's he'll have a pleasant evenin' but he thinks—that's the kind o' woman I am." The last she said as if she had said it many times before and it held the concentrated bitterness of her hateful life. "An'," she added, turning upon him and speaking fiercely, as if he had been the one to accuse her, "it's true. It is the kind o' woman I am. An' I don't want to be. I want to set down with my sewin' an' watch the baby playin' round. What is it about me? What makes 'em foller me an' offer me things an' try, one way or another, to bring me down? What is it?"

She was panting with the passion of what seemed an accusation of him with all mankind. He added one more to his list of indictments against nature as God had made it. Here she was, a lure, innocent, he could have sworn, backed up against the defenses of her ignorance, and the whole machinery of nature was moving upon her, seeking, with its multitudinous hands, to pull her in and utilize her for its own ends.

"Never mind," he said harshly. "Don't try to understand things. You can't. We can't any of us. Only I'll tell you how you looked to me, that first minute. You looked like the Virgin Mary, Mother of Christ."

She shrank a little. He had touched, he saw, innocent prejudices.

"Are you a Roman Catholic?" she asked.

"No," he said, "not that nor anything. But you see how good you looked to me. It doesn't hurt any of us to be Catholic, if we're good."

"I didn't mean anything," she said humbly. "Only there ain't many round here."

"You say your husband is religious. Does he go to church?"

"Yes," she answered soberly, and also with a kind of wonder at a man's accomplishing so dull an observance. "We go twice every Sunday, an' Sunday school an' evenin' meetin' besides."

"Do you like it?"

"No," she said, looking rueful, as if trusting he might forgive her. "I git sleepy."

At this Raven laughed and she glanced at him mildly, as if wandering what he had found to please him. He had been thinking.

"Now," he said, "we must plan what you're going to do. You won't let me send you and the baby away to stay awhile?"

She shook her head.

"Then what are we going to do? Can't you let me go to him and tell him, man to man, what an infernal fool he is?"

A wild alarm flew into her face.

"No! no!" she said.

"What is going to happen? You can't go home."

"Oh, yes, I can," said she. "I always do. It works off. Maybe it's worked off now. He gits all wore out actin' the way he does, an' then he's terrible scared for fear I've made way with myself, an' he's all bowed down."

"Oh!" said Raven. "And you've got him where you want him. And you settle down and wait for another spell. How long do you generally stay away?"

"Long's I can," she answered simply. "Till I'm afraid baby'll git cold. I keep his little things where I can ketch 'em up an' run. But sometimes he 'most gits a chill."

The yearning of anxiety in her voice was intense enough, he thought, to balance the grief of all the mothers bereft by Herod.

"I don't see," he said, "how you get up here anyway. You must come by the road? Why doesn't he follow you?"

The slow red surged into her face. She was hesitating. There was evidently worse to come.

"He gits so mad," she said, with frequent pauses between the words, "he don't stay in the house after he's had a spell. I guess he don't dare to. He's afraid of what he'll do. He goes out an' smashes away at the woodpile or suthin.' An' it's then I ketch up the baby an' run. I go out the side door an' up the road a piece an' into the back road. Then I come down the loggin' road the back way an' end up here. It's God's mercy," she said passionately, "they've broke out that loggin' road or there wouldn't be any path an' he'd see my tracks in the snow."

"Then," said Raven, "if he has sense enough to go and work it off on the woodpile, perhaps you aren't in any real danger, after all."

She looked at him piteously. Her eyes narrowed with a frowning return to a scene of terror past and persistently avoided in retrospect.

"'Most always," she said, in a low tone, "it comes on him ag'in, an' then, 'fore you know it, he's back in the house. Once he brought the axe with him. Baby was in the cradle. The cradle head's split right square acrost."

"Good God!" said Raven. "And you won't let me send you away from here?"

"Why, Mr. Raven," said she, and her voice was only less exquisite in its tenderness than when she spoke of the baby, "ain't I married to him?"

They sat looking at each other, and the suffused beauty of her face was so moving to him that he got up and went to the window and stared out at the tree branches in their winter calm. He made himself stand there looking at them and thinking persistently of them, not of her. She would not bear thinking of, this thing of beauty and need and, at the same time, inexorability of endurance. Unless she would let him help her, he was only driving the hot ploughshare of her misery through his own heart for nothing. So he stood there, mechanically studying the trees and remembering how they would wake from this frozen calm on a night when the north wind got at them and made them thrash at one another in the fury of their destiny. Her voice recalled him.

"I don't mean," she said, "to make you feel bad. I hadn't ought to put it on anybody else's shoulders, anyway."

Then Raven realized that the tenderness in her voice was for him. He turned and came back to his place by the fire. But he did not sit. He stood looking at her as she looked anxiously up at him.

"I'll tell you what we'll do," he said, "for the present, anyway. I'm going now, and you're to stay here as long as you think best. When you go, lock the door and put the key under the flat stone out by the step. I often leave the key there. I'll make sure the stone isn't frozen down. Now, you understand, don't you? You're to come up here whenever you like. If there isn't a fire, you're to build one. Nobody will disturb you. Jerry won't be cutting up here. I'll send him down into the lower woods."

"But," she said, in evident concern, "I can't do that. You come up here to write your books. Mr. Tenney said so, when he was tellin' me who all the neighbors were. He said you had the shack repaired so's to write your books."

Raven smiled. Books seemed far removed from this naked face of life.

"I'm not writing books now," he said. "I'm just hanging round. I may go over and see your husband, ask him to do some work for me."

The quick look of alarm ran into her face.

"Oh," she breathed, "you won't——"

"No," he answered steadily, "I won't say a word about you. Of course I sha'n't. And I won't to anybody."

"An'," she broke in tumultuously, "if you should see me—oh, it's an awful thing to say, after what you've done for me this day—but you won't act as if you ever see me before?"

That was the only wisdom, Raven saw, but a band seemed to tighten about his heart. Deny her before men, she whom he had not yet untangled from the rapt vision of their meeting?

"No," he said, "I won't even look at you. Now I'm going. I'll loosen up the stone."

She rose to her imposing height and came to him where he stood, his hand on the latch. Her eyes brimmed. In the one glance he had of her, he thought such extremity of gratitude might, in another instant, break in a flood of words.

"Go back," he said, "where nobody can see you when I open the door. Jerry may have taken a notion to come up."

She turned obediently and he did not look at her again. He opened the door and stepped out. The stone was there beside the larger one below the sill. He bent and wrenched it up from the ground where the frost was holding it, and with such unregarding force that the edges hurt his hands. He smiled a little at the savage satisfaction of the act, wondering if this was how Tenney felt when he smashed away at the wood. Then he remembered that the key was inside, tapped on the door, opened it and spoke to her:

"You'd better lock the door. Keep it locked till you go."

She was sitting before the fire, her head bent almost to her knee, her face in her hands. He closed the door and waited until he heard her step and the turning of the key. Then he strode out into the logging road and down the slope. One certainty surged and trembled in him: that he had never been so sorry for anybody in his life.

X

Raven, determinedly shedding his emotion, plunged fast down the hill and into the house where Charlotte was busy in a steam of fragrances from stove and cooking table and Jerry sat smoothing an axe helve.

"See here," said Raven, pulling off his gloves and advancing to the stove, where Jerry, looking mildly up, made room for him, "are you thinning out up on the ridge?"

Jerry nodded.

"That's what you wrote," said he.

"I've changed my mind," said Raven. "It looks mighty well up there as it is, for the present, anyway. Didn't you say there was a lot of gray birch that needed to go down in the river pasture?"

Again Jerry nodded, and Charlotte, evidently not finding this definite enough, put in:

"Why, yes, Jerry, seems to me you said so. 'Twas in that letter you had me write."

"Well," said Raven, "I want you to get at the river woods. I want 'em cleaned up. Couldn't you get somebody to help you? That man Tenney, how about him?"

Jerry, confronted by haste and emergency, two flying visitants he never could encounter adequately, opened his mouth and looked at Charlotte.

"Why, yes," said she. "He's a great hand to work. You said so yourself, Jerry, only last week."

"Then what if we should hire him?" said Raven. "What if I should go up and ask him now?"

Jerry was slowly coming to.

"He's been by here to-day," said he, "axe in his hand. Went as if he's sent for. Then he went back."

"Well, that was an hour or more ago," said Charlotte. "You says to me, 'Where's he be'n?' says you. Yes, he's got home long 'fore this. You'll find him some'r's round home."

"All right," said Raven. "Don't go up on the ridge again, Jerry. I want it left as it is."

He hurried out through the shed and Charlotte and Jerry exchanged glances, his entirely bemused and she sympathetically tender.

"'Course he don't want you cuttin' on the ridge," she said. "He's goin' up there to write his books. I should think you could see that."

For Charlotte, when no third person was by to observe Jerry's sloth at the uptake, had methods of her own to keep him mentally alive. If he did lag a pace behind, it was his secret and hers, and sometimes, between themselves, it was wholesome to recognize it.

Raven walked at top speed. He could not, at his utmost, get to Tenney soon enough. It was true, he was under vow not to assault or accuse him, but it seemed to him the woman would not be even intermittently safe unless the man were under his eye. As the picture of her flashed again to his mind, sitting by his hearth, her head bowed in grief unspeakable, he wondered what he should call her. Surely not, in his rage against Tenney, by Tenney's name. She was "the woman," she was the pitiful type of all suffering womanhood.

There was the house, rather narrow in build, but painted white, with green blinds. The narrowness gave it a look of unwelcoming meagerness, this although it was of a good size. Raven wondered why some minds ran to pointed roofs, inhospitable to the eye. This looked to him like Tenney, his idea of him. The barn was spacious, and beautiful in silver gray, and the woodpile, Raven decided ironically, a marvel of artistic skill. He had never seen such a big woodpile, so accurately trimmed at the corners, so perfect in the face of an extended length. It must, he judged, represent a good many hours of jealous madness, if it was entirely the product of those outbreaks when Tenney went out to smash wood. And there, round one corner of the pile, was Tenney himself. Raven realized that he had not expected to find him. Actually he had believed the man was raging over snowy hillsides somewhere about, armed with his axe and uttering those catamount cries. Tenney was not at work. He was standing perfectly still, looking up the road.

"Hullo!" called Raven, turning into the yard, and the man jerked back a step and then stopped and awaited him.

It was not a step actually. His feet did not leave the ground. He merely, his whole body, seemed thrown out of position, to recover instantly. Raven, watching him as he traversed the few steps between them, decided that he was uncontrollably nervous, frightened, too, perhaps, at what his apprehensive mind pictured: and that was good for him. What was Tenney, according to his look? Raven, scrutinizing him as he approached, determined to know something more than he had caught from those preoccupied minutes in the woods. How, if he had his pen in hand, would he describe Israel Tenney for one of the folk tales Anne had so persistently urged him to? A thin, tall man with narrow shoulders and yet somehow giving an impression of great wiry strength. He had a boldly drawn line of profile, hair black and glossy and, as Raven saw with distaste, rather long under his hat, vertical lines marking his cheeks, lines deeper than seemed justified by his age, and, as he had noted before, his eyes were also black with a spark in them. What was the spark? It was, Raven concluded again, in this quick scrutiny, like that in the eyes of inventors and visionaries. He wore clothes so threadbare that it seemed as if he must have been cold. But they were patched with a scrupulous nicety that made some revulsion in Raven rise up and dramatically spur him to a new resentment. She had patched them. Her faithful needle had spent its art on this murderer of her peace. He had reached the woodpile now and Tenney came a step forward.

"Great woodpile you've got here," said Raven.

Tenney put out his hand and rested it on one of the sticks. He might have been caressing a pet dog.

"Stove wood length," he said briefly. Then he seemed to feel some curiosity over being sought out after their meeting on the rise and asked: "D'you find your knife?"

"Why, yes," said Raven. "Didn't you see me hold it up to you?"

Tenney nodded, frowning. He seemed to conclude he was giving himself away, showing more interest in the stranger than the stranger had in any way earned. But he asked another question. It leaped from him. He had to ask it.

"D'you see anybody up round there after I come down?"

Raven shook his head, looking, he hoped, vague.

"I came down myself," he said. "I had to talk with Jerry about his thinning out."

The eagerness faded from Tenney's face.

"I didn't see Jerry up there this mornin'," he volunteered, in an indifferent contribution toward the talk.

"No," said Raven. "You won't see him up there at all after this—for a spell, that is. I write, you know, books. I like to go up to the hut to work. Not so likely to be interrupted there. I don't want chopping going on."

Tenney, with a quick lift of the head, looked at him questioningly. Raven saw anger also in the look, at last anger ready to spring. Both men had the same thought. Tenney wondered if the owner of the wood was going to taunt him again with yelling like a catamount, and Raven did actually put aside an impulse toward it.

"D'you come over here to forbid my goin' up in your woods?" Tenney inquired.

"No," said Raven. "I came to ask you if you could help Jerry do some thinning out in the river pasture. I'm rather in a hurry about that."

"Why, yes," Tenney began. Then he added breathlessly, as if another part of his mind (the suffering, uncontrolled part) broke in on his speech: "Not yet, though. I can't do anything yet, not till I see how things turn."

Raven thought he understood. Tenney could settle to nothing until he knew when his wife was coming back or whether she was coming at all. Now that the vision of her had entered on their stage, he was conscious of answering coldly:

"All right. You can make up your mind and go over and see Jerry. He'll arrange it with you."

On these words, he was about turning away, when he found Tenney suddenly oblivious of him. The man's thin face was quivering into a pathetic disorder, flushed, quite beyond his control. He neither heard Raven nor saw him, though he did speak brokenly:

"There!" he said. "There she is now."

Raven, turning, followed his gaze, directed up the road, not the way he had come. There she was, walking toward them with swift, long steps, the child held with the firmness that still seemed a careless buoyancy, as he had seen her in the woods. She had come home, as she went, the back way. Raven could have stood there through the long minute, motionless, waiting for her to come to him, for it seemed as if it were to him she came, not Tenney. But he recalled himself with a brusqueness so rough and sudden that it was as if he gave himself a blow. That last glance had shown him she had nothing more to fear from Tenney, for this time at least. The man had been horribly frightened at her going. Now he was under her heel. Raven did not give her another look. He turned homeward, and called back to Tenney loudly enough for her to overhear him and be under no apprehension as to what had passed:

"Make up your mind, then come and talk it over with Jerry. It's chopping, you understand, gray birches down in the river pasture."

Tenney did not answer, and Raven, striding along the road, listened with all possible intentness to hear whether husband and wife spoke together. He thought not, but he did hear the closing of a door.

XI

Thyatira—this was her name, and she was called Tira—passed her husband apparently without a glance. Nevertheless she had, in approaching, become adequately aware of his disordered look, and the fact of it calmed her to a perfect self-possession. She could always, even from one of these fleeting glimpses, guess at the stage his madman's progress had reached, and the present drop in temperature restored her everyday sense of safety. With it came a sudden ebbing of energy and endurance. The "spell" was over for the time, but her escape from the shadow of it left her nerveless and almost indifferent to its returning; apathetic, too, to her tormentor. Going in, she closed the door behind her, apparently not noticing that he followed her, and when he opened it and came in, she was sitting in his great chair by the fire, taking off the baby's coat, and, with the capable, anxious mother motion, feeling the little hands. Tenney came up to her and the child, turning at his step, looking up at him solemnly. Tira's heart seemed to contract within her. This was the very glance, "lookin' up kinder droll," that had brought on the storm. But for Tenney it evidently meant something now that fitted his mood of passionate anxiety to get back into the warm security of domestic peace.

"You lemme take him," he said, "whilst you git off your things. You'll ketch your death o' cold, carryin' on so."

The last he had to add. She was, his defensive inner mind told him, all wrong in flying out of the house "like a crazed creatur'" when she might have stayed and told him, just told him, whether she was the kind of woman he, at these unheralded mad moments, thought she was. That was the undercurrent always in his mind: if she wouldn't be so still and hateful, if she would only tell him. She might have some pity on a man, that defensive inner mind advised him, when she saw him all worked up. But the minute he warned her the devil of doubt was again tempting him, she began to freeze up and wouldn't speak to him at all. No wonder, with that devil inside whispering to him and hounding him on—no wonder he said things and—he trembled here and dared not follow out that thought—and was afraid he might do things. But she shook her head, at his offer of taking the child.

"You might go an' cut a slice o' ham," she said wearily. "It's 'most dinner time. We might's well have that as anything."

But the baby reached out and closed his little fingers about Tenney's thumb. Tenney stood there, his heart swelling within him at the contrast between the child's forgivingness and her cruelty. Now she had the child's outer things off, and she rose with them in one hand, carrying the child on the other arm, and it was her movement that dragged the little fingers away and broke that significant clasp on Tenney's thumb. How hateful she could be, he thought, his heart swelling more and more. He stood where she left him, and she went to the low couch and set the baby down there, and put into his hand a formless doll she wanted him to love. He never really noticed it, but she felt he would sometime love the doll. Then she glanced, with the air of being recalled to a wearisome routine, at the table in the middle of the floor; it meant ham and eggs. It seemed also to occur to her that she had not taken off her cloak, and she hung it on its nail behind the door. Soon, as Tenney, still motionless there by the stove, seemed mutely accusing her, mutely imploring her not to be cruel, she did turn and look at him. The thought of Raven was uppermost in her mind. It had been there every minute since she had gone into his house in the woods, but now it roused compellingly, stronger than even her present apprehension. Most of all, she was penetrated by a wonder almost greater than any emotion she had ever felt, at having laid before him at once and without persuasion, the story of her life. Why should she have told him? She would have said no decent woman could betray her husband to another man. It was entirely mysterious, and she gave it up. But there was, behind the wonder, a dazzling sense that he was different. As he had told her that strange thing she hardly dared think of now, because it seemed as if she must have misunderstood him—the thing about her looking so good and wonderful when he came upon her—so he, in his kindness and compassion, his implication of assuming a mysterious responsibility for her, seemed unbelievably good, not a citizen of this bleak neighborhood—or even the world (her mind, though stumblingly, ran as far as that) and, more astounding still, the real miracle was that he had been sent for this: to save her. And at that moment of dazed reflection, it all meant the passionate necessity of obeying him. He had bade her show her husband how she loved him. Seeing the man was jealous, he had pitied him. Perhaps she had not thought, since these last apprehensive days with Tenney, whether she loved him or not. He had simply, at the times of recurrent tragedy, been the terror within the house, and she had lived a life of breathless consecration to the one task of saving the child. Did she love him? Raven had assumed she did, and in her devotion to him she must, in some form, obey. Almost it seemed to her there would be shame in not loving her husband, if Raven expected it of her. None of these things were formulated in her mind. They were only shadowy impulses, like the forces of nature, persuading, impelling her. She had no words; she had scarcely, as to the abstractions she dimly felt and never saw, any reasoned thought. But she did have an unrecognized life of the emotions, and this was surging in her now.

She stood for a second looking at Tenney, the distended beauty of her eyes like a question, a challenge. She seemed, though this neither of them could know, to be beseeching him to tell her what treatment he deserved of her, or what would make their case whole. They were simple people, these two, but she had leaped, without knowing it herself, to a new plane of life. She was still with Raven in the hut, trying to speak his language, follow out his thought for her. She gave a little quick rush across the room and, to Tenney's overwhelming surprise, her hands were on his shoulders, her face so close to his that her sweet breath fanned him. He had never seen her so. She had to be pursued, coaxed, tired out with persuasion before she would even accept the warmth he too often had for her.

"Isr'el," she said, "Isr'el Tenney! if you ever ag'in, so long as you live, think wrong o' that baby there, you'll be the wickedest man on God's earth."

His arms closed about her and she stood passive. Yet she wanted to free herself. Did she love him? The question Raven had seemed to illuminate kept beating on in her tired head. Did she love him? And as Tenney's arms clung closer and his lips were on hers, she threw back her head and cried violently:

"No, I don't."

"Don't what?" he asked, releasing her slightly, and she drew away from him and, still obeying Raven, made one disordered effort at assurance.

"If you think"—here she stopped. She could not go on. It had always seemed to her a wrong to the baby to put the vile suspicion into words. "If you think," she tried again, "what you said this mornin'—O Isr'el, I've been as true to you as you are to your God."

He was religious, she often told herself, chiefly in her puzzled musings after a "spell" was over, and this was the strongest vow she could imagine. But it disconcerted him.

"There! there!" he said. "Don't say such things."

Evidently the name of God was for Sundays. But he was uneasily reassured. He was, at least, in a way of sense, delighted. He put his face to hers and thickly bade her kiss him. He was not for the moment horrible to her unconsenting will. Rather she found herself rejoicing. When she could escape from him (and she felt no fear, her wild belief in herself was so great) she thought she could dance and sing. For now she knew she did not love him, and it made her feel so free. Always there had been some uneasy bond, first with the man who cajoled her to her heart-break and the miserable certainty that, whatever magic was in a good name, it was hers no more, and then with Tenney, whom she had followed humbly, gratefully, because he had been so kind and told her nothing mattered if she would marry him. But now she felt a sudden snapping of the bond and she knew that, in her mind, at least, in her moments of solitude with the baby, she could dance upon the hills of life. It was an entirely new sense of ecstasy, a thrilling of her blood. She laughed out, a low, excited laugh, and put him from her and called gaily:

"You slice the ham, an' I'll git out some eggs."

Tenney stared at her a minute, perplexed and wondering. Then his face relaxed slightly. It might have been said he smiled. There was apparently a good feeling in the house, such as he had never been able to create. She had always been kind, conformable, but she had never laughed like this, nor in his sight taken up the baby and tossed him until he, too, laughed gurglingly. She cooked the dinner and Tenney, not able to take himself out of her bewildering presence, hung about and watched her and, when the baby began to fret for food, took him up and walked with him until Tira was free. And while they ate dinner the baby slept again on the lounge: for the cradle, grim witness Tenney could not bring himself to look at now, had been moved into the bedroom.

"D'you see that feller jest goin' when you come into the yard?" Tenney asked her, when his first hunger was over and he leaned back in his chair to look at her where she sat, only picking at her food, he thought anxiously. She seemed queer to him to-day, with the rapt, exalted look of one who had seen strange things and been tired by them, the tremulous eloquence of her lips. She was, he owned to himself, yet not with any satisfaction, because any smallest allurement in her lessened his chance of keeping her faith inviolate, a likely looking woman.

"I wish," he said irritably, out of his uneasiness over her, "you'd eat suthin.' You're all beat out."

She smiled at him. She felt kindly toward him as to a part of the world that had at least begun to show its softer side to her.

"No," she said, "I ain't beat out."

"D'you see him?" he pursued, his thoughts recurring to Raven.

"Yes," she responded, in a low tone, "I see him."

"'Twas Raven. You knew he was comin' up to stay a spell. Don't ye remember I see Jerry an' he told me? He wants me to go down in his river pastur', choppin'. All of a whew to git at it. Jest like them city folks. If a thing comes into their head, they'll shake the footstool but they'll git it."

"Yes," said Tira. "I think 's likely."

She got up to bring the pie, warming in the oven, and when her back was toward him she allowed herself a smile, happy, unrestrained, at Raven's thought for her. She knew why Tenney was to be drawn off down to the river pasture. This was a part of Raven's understanding and his beneficence.

"You goin'?" she asked, returning to her chair.

"Yes," said Tenney. "Might 's well."

When he had eaten he went out to his chores and she cleared the table and walked about the house with a light step. She had been working heavily of late, with a dull mind, but now there seemed to be a reason for doing every task as perfectly as it could be done. There was not a suspicion in her mind that Raven had a charm for her or that she could possibly have a charm for him. He had simply opened a window for the light to come in; he had shown her the door of escape. This was the first simple kindness she had ever had. When she was little, the family life had been a disorderly struggle for bare existence, and as she grew into an ignorant girlhood she began to be angrily conscious that she herself, she who did not recognize the power of her own beauty and with it the strange force that lay beneath it, like a philter, for man's undoing, was an object of pursuit by men made mad through passions she hated. She had the simplest tastes, the most inconsiderable desires. She would go off by herself then and spend a day wandering about the woods, cooling her feet in brooks, sleeping under a tree. No man could make her happiness completer, hanging about her steps, staring her down with bold, impudent eyes. She even thought, in a formless way (for she had no orderly inner life of wonder and conclusion) whether she should have taken refuge with the light-haired man who was now driving Tenney to madness, if he had not had that drollery of looking at you, like a boy really, who cared only for a boy's fitful fun. But he was not kind. The kindness had been only to lure her into trusting him, just as Tenney's had turned into a rage of abusive jealousy. Raven's kindness was different. It was not in any degree personal to her. She knew he would have been as merciful to a squirrel caught in a trap. And the scars of his own mental sufferings and restraints had done something to him, something inexplicable that made him wonderful in her eyes. He seemed, too, all-powerful. He was that miraculous combination of the human guide and heavenly helper, with the wisdom to understand earthly trouble and the power to administer what remedy there might be.

Tenney did not come in until supper time. He had been over to Raven's, he told her, and seen Jerry about the chopping. They were going in the morning early. She made no reply. She was still at peace in the thought of Raven's kindness, but the turmoil of the day had told on her, and she was so tired that she could scarcely drag herself about; her eyes kept closing as she moved. Tenney was still expectantly eager for an awakening of her leniency. At eight o'clock he brought out the Bible and stiffened himself into the rigidity that was the mail for his spiritual combats. He was always referring to himself, at these times of religious observance, as a servant of the Cross, and Tira used wearily to wonder whether he felt obliged to arrange himself for combats that, so far as she knew, never seemed to come off. There was a mysterious adversary he was always describing with an apprehension that made her wonder if Israel could really be afraid, and if that was why he announced so belligerently that he was ready for him. Neither of them thought of the combat as being simply the grim fight the will of men is doomed to on the dark plain of man's mysterious sojourn. It seemed to them outside somewhere, dramatic, imminent, and yet, if you prayed loudly enough and read your chapter, not certain to happen at all. At least this seemed to be what Tenney thought, and Tira, when she dwelt upon it, sleepily followed him. To-night he was reading in Revelation, and when he had finished that, he would begin, in due course, at Genesis, and go on with an iron persistency of accomplishment as methodical as ploughing a field. Tira, sitting at her side of the hearth, heard, through drowsy ears, the incomprehensible vision of the tree of life with its twelve manner of fruits, and when Israel shut the Bible with an air of virtuous finality, she came awake and sat guiltily upright.

"You've been asleep," he accused her frowningly. "Anybody'd think you could keep yourself awake over the Word o' God."

Tira leaned back in her chair and yawned with the simplicity of the natural animal. Tenney caught his breath, the redness of her mouth and the gleam of her teeth were so bewitching to him. He got up and carried away the Bible. When he came back from the best room she was moving about, setting away chairs and then brushing up the few chips on the hearth.

"I'm beat out," she acknowledged, with a wistful look at him, half deprecating humility. "I guess I'll poke off to bed."

"Yes," said Tenney, "le's go."

At that minute there was a little waking call from the bedroom off the sitting-room. Tenney gave her a startled glance.

"Why," he said, "you got him in there?"

They had been used to keeping the baby covered on the kitchen or the sitting-room couch until their own bedtime and Tenney, preoccupied with his last chore of reading the Scriptures, had not noticed that his wife had carried him into the bedroom instead.

"Yes," she said, with a significant quiet. "I thought 'twas full warmer in the bed. I'm goin' to stay with him."

"In there?" Tenney repeated. "All night?"

She nodded at him. The afternoon brightness was again on her face, and for an instant he felt afraid of her, she looked so strange. Then he laughed a little. He thought he understood, and, advancing, put a hand on her shoulder and spoke in an awkward tenderness.

"Here," said he, "you ain't afraid o' me, be you? Why, I wouldn't no more lay hands on him——"

He had meant to add that she had reassured him by her disclaimer of the morning. But he could not quite manage that. Words were not his servants. They were his enemies, especially at such times as he was mad with rage. Then they came too fast and got the better of him, and he could hardly ever remember afterward what they were. Tira slipped from under his hand and continued her ordered tasks about the room. But she smiled at him in the friendliest way.

"Oh, no," she said, "I ain't the leastest mite afraid." She laughed a little, in a manner mystifying to him, for it suddenly seemed to her she should never be afraid of anything again.

Tenney stood there, his eyes following her as she moved about the room, and again the thought of her cruelty possessed him. Last of all her orderly deeds, she lighted a little lamp and set it on the table near him.

"Don't you forgit to blow it out," she warned him. "I'm terrible afraid o' fire, these winter nights. I won't put out the big lamp yet. I can see to undress by it, an' then baby won't wake up."

He took his lamp and set it down again and went to the bedroom door, her eyes following him.

"I dunno," he said, in a strangled voice, "as there's any need o' that in there, for folks to tumble over."

He stepped inside, took up the cradle with the telltale gash in the hood, carried it through the kitchen and set it outside the door, in the shed.

"I'll carry it up into the shed chamber to-morrer," he said, in the same tortured voice.

Then he took his lamp and turned to go. He was as much surprised at himself as she could have guessed. For some reason—and he did not know the reason—he could not bear to leave her there in the dark with the silent witness standing by to cry out against him. Yet this he did not think. He only knew he must get the cradle out of the room and do it quickly. When he had reached the door to the enclosed staircase, her voice halted him so abruptly that the light quivered in his hand.

"Isr'el," it called, "you're real good. Don't you be cold. There's a blanket on the foot."

But though he hesitated another minute, the voice had nothing more for him, and he went slowly up to bed. As he undressed, his thoughts down there with her, he wondered how her voice could have sounded so gay.

In the middle of the night, Tira woke suddenly, with the sense of something near. There was the moon flooding the little room, and in the doorway stood a figure.

"That you, Isr'el?" she called clearly.

"Yes," he said, and then hesitated, "you all right?"

"Yes," she answered, in the same clear voice, with something commanding in it now. "We're all right. You go back to bed, so's to git your sleep. I'll call you if I'm up first."

Tenney turned away, and she heard his hesitating step through the kitchen and on the stairs. Then, as if this had been as commonplace an interlude in her night as the baby's waking and drowsing off again, she felt herself surging happily away to sleep.

XII

Raven, tired to lethargy by the morning's turmoil, stayed in the house until after dinner. He sat by the library fire, a book on his knee, chiefly to convince Charlotte, who would inevitably detect his drop in responsive liveliness, that he was merely absorbed and not moping. Once or twice she did appear at the door, plainly to look at him, but, finding he kept his eyes on the page, she did not speak. The life had gone out of him. He wondered at himself for being so fagged. Yet it had been a good deal of a strain, that anguish of a creature he was not allowed to help; it was exacting a heavy penalty. He found his mind dwelling on it, look by look, word by word, and finding no relief except in the thought of Tenney in the river pasture, chopping. If that came to pass, the woman would be safe for hours she could count upon.

That afternoon, Jerry reported that Tenney had been over and promised to appear next morning with his axe. Then Raven went off for a walk along the road skirting the base of the mountain. Possibly he chose it because it led to the woman's old home, and the thought of her was uppermost in his mind. The road itself was still and dark, subdued to a moving silence, it might almost seem, by the evergreens, watchers on the high cliff at the left, and the quiet of the river, now under ice, on the other side below. He kept on to the stepping stones, at the verge of the scattered settlement of Mountain Brook. They were rough granite at regular distances apart, only the tops of them visible above the ice, and they made the concluding stage of the walk across lots from Wake Hill to Mountain Brook. In spring the water swirled about them madly, and it was one of the adventures of boyhood for a squad to go over to the stepping stones and leap from one to another without splashing into the foam below. This was "playing Moosewood," the Indian who had been found there drowned, whether by his own act because the local palefaces had got his hill-top, over beyond, or from prolonged fire-water, no one knew. But always he was a noble red man and one boy acted his despairing part, and the others hunted him across the stones. In the game, he always escaped and "shinnied" up the cliff opposite, by fissures the boys of every generation knew, and struck a pose among the evergreens above, whooping down defiance.

Raven stopped there and gave a thought to the boy he had been, and then to Anne, who had once taken the walk across lots with him, and who, when he told her how they used to play Moosewood, insisted on crossing, though he had tried to dissuade her, noting her foolish shoes, and aware that she had no adroitness of eye and muscle. But she had a will of steel in these matters, as well as those of the spirit, and would not be prevailed on. Three of the daring leaps she made from one stone to another and at the fourth she slipped and he caught and held her, the delicate slenderness of her, in his arms. He had felt awkward merely and sorry for her, she so overprized doing things superlatively well, and when they reached the bank she was flushed and shaken, and again he was sorry, it seemed so slight a thing to care about. But as he looked down there now he was thinking really about her he called "the woman" in his mind. She would not slip. She was as perfectly adapted in every tempered muscle to the rough conditions of natural life as the pioneer women who helped their men clear the wilderness and set hearthstones. It darkened between the firs and they began to stir a little, as if a wind were coming up, and he turned back home, again growing uneasy about her, shut up there with her tormentor and walled about by the dark.

He had his supper early, and he did not again invite Charlotte and Jerry to eat with him. Now, he felt, he should need all the solitude he could get to think out this thing he seemed to have taken upon himself, and keep a grip on his anxiety. After supper he asked Charlotte for blankets and a pillow. She did not look at him, but he was clearly aware that she was worried and would not let him read it in her eyes.

"It's all right, Charlotte," he assured her. "I just want some things up there at the hut, for the couch, that's all."

"You ain't goin' to sleep up there, be you?" she asked quietly. Charlotte, he knew, had felt his mood. She saw he was on edge.

"No," he said, "I shall be right back. Only I want to get them up there. To-morrow I shall be carrying books and things."

She got the blankets without a word, venturing only, as she gave them to him:

"Jerry'll be as mad as fire with me for not sendin' him up to lug 'em."

Raven smiled at her and went off with his load. He carried also his electric torch, and traversing the dark between the moving trees, creaking now and complaining, at the door of the hut he flashed on the light and lifted the stone. The key was there. That gave him a momentary relief. She had understood and done her part toward his task of defending her. He went in, tossed the things over a chair, and lighted one of the candles on the mantel. The hearth was cold and he piled logs and kindling. Then he put the pillow in its place on the couch and spread the blankets. That was to show her she was to make herself comfortable. The match-box he placed on the mantel, where it seemed likely her hand would touch it, if she thought to feel there, and beside it his torch. It might be a momentary defence against the impalpable terrors of the night. But he was not sure she would feel any terrors, save of the defined and tangible. That he considered absorbedly as he went down the path after placing the key under the stone. It was not that she was insensitive. He felt in her the alert readiness of a perfectly acting nervous system. It showed itself in her self-control, her readiness of courage, her persistent calm. She would not thrill with apprehension over the tapping of those boughs against the walls: only at a voice or a human tread.

When he went in at his own door Charlotte appeared, with a quick step, from the kitchen. She was relieved, he saw. Dear Charlotte! she did not know how his anxieties were mounting, but she did feel the uneasiness he had brought with him. He tried to throw her off the track of her silent interrogations.

"I'm dog tired," he told her. "I believe I'll go to bed."

"That's right," said she. "Your fire's been blazed up quite a while."

"Don't you know," he called back to her from the stairs, "how we always sleep when we first come? I suppose it's the altitude."

"Yes," said Charlotte. "So 'tis, anyhow accordin' to Jerry."

Raven carried the look of her anxious, warm-colored face with him. It was all motherly. Yet she had no children. Jerry lived under the daily chrism of that soft well-wishing. And there was the woman up the road, looking like a spiritual mother of men and strangely, mysteriously, also like the ancient lure that makes men mad, and she had to fight like a tigress for the mere life of her child. The contrast leaped into the kaleidoscopic disorder he saw now as life like a brilliant, bizarre fragment to make the whole scheme (if the scheme could be even estimated by mortal minds) more disorderly still. But he was tired and he slept. It would be good, he had thought for many weeks now, when he felt himself drifting off, to sleep forever. To-night he did not want that everlasting sleep. He wanted life, life to its full of power and probity, to stand between the woman and her terror. Suddenly he woke, and lay, his heart beating hard at the sound of the pines in the grove. Charlotte had done her best to put the breadth of the house between him and their lamenting, but their voices crept round the corner and into his open windows, and invaded his mind. He lay there, the wind on his face and that sighing melancholy of theirs calling him to an answering sadness of his own. And now it was not his inexplicable panic of disaffection toward the earth as God had made it, but a pageant of darkness where formless terrors moved, all hostile to the woman. At this moment, she seemed to him the point of blinding pain about which the general misery of the world revolved. She was beauty in the flesh. She led the mind to the desire of holy things. At least, that was where she had led his mind.

But the cruelty of creation was not content with setting her loose in the world of created things with the gift of beauty and holiness in her hand. It had veiled her also with the mysterious magic that was simple enough and directly compelling enough to rouse the beast of jealousy, the beast of mastery, in the hearts of men. She did not seem to him an Aphrodite, bearing in her hand the cup of love. There was something childlike about her, something as virginal as in Nan. He could believe she would be endlessly pleased with simple things, that she could be made to laugh delightedly over the trivialities of daily life. But the hand of creation having made her, the brain of creation (that inexorable force bent only on perpetuation) saw she was too good a thing to be lost, too innocently persuasive to the passion of men. So it had thrown over her the veil of mystery and pronounced against her the ancient curse that she should be desired of many and yet too soft of her heart, too weak in her defenses, even to foresee the pitfalls that awaited her wandering feet and would sometime break her bones.

This was the worst of all the sleepless hours he had had, and in the morning he was up and out before Charlotte was ready for him. Jerry had breakfasted, when Raven came on him in the barn. He expected Tenney to go chopping, and he wanted the chores done, to get off early. Raven went in then and told Charlotte he would not have his own breakfast until Jerry had gone. He wanted to say a word to him as to the gray birches. But actually he could not down his impatience to know whether Tenney was coming at all. So he hung about and hindered Jerry with unnecessary talk for a half hour or so, and while they were standing in the yard together, looking down toward the river pasture, and Raven was specifying, with more emphasis than he felt, that a fringe of trees should be kept along the mowing, Tenney came. Jerry at once said he'd go in and get his dinner pail and Raven waited for Tenney. This was not the man of yesterday. He carried his axe and dinner pail. He walked alertly, as if his mind were on his day's work, and the pale face had quite lost its livid excitement. It was grave and even sad. Raven, seeing that, wondered if the fellow could feel remorse, and was conscious of a lift in the cloud of his own anxiety. Tenney, not waiting to be addressed, walked straight up to him. He spoke, as soon as he was within hearing distance of a tone of ordinary volume, and what he said surprised Raven even more than the catamount calls of yesterday:

"Be you saved?"

Raven knew the salient country phrases, but, so alien was the question to his conception of the man, that he answered perplexedly:

"What do you mean by saved?"

Tenney set down his dinner pail, as if it hampered him, and began rhythmically, in the voice of the exhorter:

"Saved by the blood of the Lamb."

Raven stepped back a pace.

"No," he said coldly, "not that I'm aware of."

Tenney came forward a step and Raven again backed. There was something peculiarly distasteful in being exhorted by a fellow of unbridled temper and a bestial mind.

"You are a sinner," said Tenney. "If you reject the great atonement, you are lost. Don't you know you be?"

"No," said Raven. He was on the point of turning away, when he remembered it was an ill-judged impetuosity he could not afford. It was more important, in this world of persecution and unstable defense, to keep your antagonist busy, cutting gray birches.

"Do you reject Him?" Tenney, too, had his day's work on his mind and he spoke rapidly, with a patent show of getting his exhortation done in time to fall into step with Jerry, appearing, at the moment, axe in hand. He picked up his dinner pail. "Do you reject Him?" he repeated, in his former singsong. "Do you reject Christ crucified?"

And in spite of the prudence his inner self had counseled, Raven found he was, perhaps only from force of habit augmented by his distaste for the man, answering truthfully:

"Yes," he said, "as you mean it, I do."

Jerry, in the road, had halted and was looking back inquiringly. Tenney started after him. Instead of being rebuffed by Raven's attitude, he seemed to be exhilarated. Raven concluded, as he saw the light of a perhaps fanatical zeal playing over his face, that the fellow took it for a challenge, an incentive to bring one more into the fold. It was something in the nature of a dare.

When he went in, Charlotte was about her tasks at the kitchen stove.

"You're not going to fodder the cattle, you know," he said to her, passing through. "I'll see to that. Jerry showed me the mow he is using from."

"I always do," said Charlotte, "when he's away all day. I admire to git out there an' smell the creatur's and hear 'em rattlin' round the stanchils till they see the hay afore 'em."

"Never mind," said Raven. "I'll do it to-day." Then a thought struck him. "I wonder," he said, "who Tenney leaves to do his chores."

"Why," said Charlotte, "I s'pose she does 'em, same's I do when I'm alone. 'Tain't no great of a job, 'specially if the hay's pitched round beforehand."

Raven, sitting down to his breakfast, thought it a good deal of a task for a woman made for soft, kind ways with children and the small domestic animals by the hearth. And then he did have the humor to laugh at himself a little. It showed how she had unconsciously beguiled him, how she had impressed him with her curious implication of belonging to things afar from this world of homespun usages. She was strong and undeniably homespun herself, in every word and look. Let her fodder the cattle. Perhaps they would add to the lonesome tranquillity of her day, with their needs and their sweet-breathed satisfactions.

XIII

For a week it was hard, clear weather, with a crystal sky and no wind. Tenney appeared in the early mornings and he and Jerry went off to their chopping. Raven's relief grew. By the last of the week he found his apprehension really lessening. Every hour of her safety gave him new reassurance, and he could even face the nights, the long hours when Tenney was at home. Tenney he took pains not to meet. He distinctly objected to being pressed into a corner by the revivalist cant of a man he could not wisely offend. Nor did he see her whom he called "the woman." Sometimes in the early dusk after Tenney had got home, he was strongly moved to walk past the house and see if their light looked cheerful, or if he could hear the sound of voices within. Smile at himself as he might, at the childishness of the fancy, he alternately thought of her as being pursued out of the house by a madman with an axe and exhorted to save herself by the blood of the Lamb. And, Tenney being what he was, the last was almost as disquieting as the actual torment. Every morning he went up to the hut to find no slightest sign of her having been there. If he stayed long enough to build a fire, he went back, after it had time to die, and laid another, so that she might light it without delay.

On the Saturday night of that week the wind veered into the east and the clouds banked up. The air had a grayness that meant snow. He had been up at the hut all the afternoon. He had pulled out an old chest, the sea-chest of a long dead Raven who had been marked with sea longing, as it sometimes happens to those bred in the hills, and had run away and become mate and captain. Raven had always been vaguely proud of him, and so, perhaps, had other Ravens, for Old Crow, when he moved up here, had brought the sea-chest with him, and his own books also were stowed away in it. Old Captain Raven's were entirely consistent with his profession—charts, a wonderful flat volume full of the starry heavens and more enchanting to Raven than any modern astronomy; but Old Crow's, in their diverse character, seemed to have been gathered together as it happened, possibly as he came on them, in no sense an index of individual taste. There were poets (strange company they made for one another!) Milton, Ossian, Byron, Thompson, Herrick, and the Essays of Montaigne, the Confessions of Rousseau. Also, the Age of Reason, which, on the testimony of uncut leaves, had not been read. And there was a worn, dog-eared Bible. Raven had never wanted to appropriate the books so far as to set them with his own on the shelves. They seemed to him, through their isolation, to keep something of the identity of Old Crow. He believed Old Crow would like this. It was precious little earthly immortality the old chap had ever got beyond the local derision, and if Raven could please him by so small a thing, he would. He had them all out on chairs and sat on the floor beside the chest, looking them over idly until it began to grow dark and, realizing how early it was, he glanced up at the windows and saw the veil of a fine falling snow. He got up, left his books in disorder, and lighted the lamp. The fire had been dying down and he kicked the sticks apart. It must die wholly so that a fresh one would run no chance of catching the coals. Yet it was unlikely she would come to-night. Tenney would be tired with his week's work.

And just as he was making himself reasons, in a mechanical way, while he put the room in order, there was a knock, quick, imperative, the door was thrown open and there she was. She was about to shut the door, but he ran before her. He did it and turned the key. Then he passed her and hurried to the fire and with both hands heaped on cones and kindling until it flared. While he did this she stood as still as a stone and when, having his fire, he turned to her, he saw she had nothing on her head and that the fine snow had drifted into the folds of her clothing and was melting on her hair. She looked more wildly disordered than when he had seen her before, for she had wrapped a blanket about her, and the child was under it, covered so closely that Raven wondered how he could breathe. He tried to take the blanket from her, but she held it desperately. It seemed as if, in unreasoning apprehension, she dared not let the child be seen. But he laid his hand on hers, saying, "Please!" authoritatively, and she let him unclasp the tense fingers, remove the blanket, and then take the child. Raven had had no experience with babies, but this one he took, in the heat of his compassion, with no doubt that he should know what to do with him. He felt the little feet and hands and, finding them warm, drew forward an arm-chair for her, and, when she sank into it, set the child in her lap.

"Put your feet to the fire," he said. "Your shoes are all snow. Better take them off."

She shook her head. She stretched her feet almost into the blaze and the steam rose from them. Raven went to the cupboard at the side of the fireplace and took down a bottle of chartreuse. But she shook her head.

"I dassent," she said. "He'll smell it."

Raven came near breaking into an oath. Did the beast own her, that he should be able, after this new outrage, to get her sweet breath?

"I ain't cold," she assured him, "not now. No, I won't drink any"—for he was about to pour it for her—"I never took much stock in them things. I've seen too much of 'em."

Then Raven remembered that Charlotte had told him all the boys drank—her brothers—and he seemed to have turned another page in her piteous life. He set back the bottle and, to give her time to recover herself, resumed his task of straightening the room. At her voice, he was at once beside her.

"Should you just as soon," she asked quietly, as if the question were of no moment, "I'd stay up here all night?"

"Of course you're to stay all night." It seemed to him too beautiful a thing to have happened, to know she was here in safety with the trees and the snow. "I'll go down and get some milk and things for him"—he was indicating the baby who, under the ecstasy of warmth, was beginning to talk strange matters, standing on his mother's knee—"I'll tell Charlotte I'm staying up here all night."

But now he saw, in surprise (for he had failed to guess how his words would strike her) that she was terrified, perhaps more by him than she had been by Tenney.

"No," she cried violently. "You can't do that. You mustn't. If you stay, I've got to go."

"I can't have you up here in the woods alone," he reasoned.

She gave a little laugh. The quality of it was ironic. It made him wonder what her laughter would be if she were allowed to savor the quaintness of sheer fun. She spoke obliquely, yet accounting for the laugh.

"What do you s'pose'd happen to me?"

"Nothing," he owned, comparing, as she meant him to, the safety of her state up here, surrounded by the trees and the wind, and her prison with the madman down below. "But I can't have it. Do you suppose I can go down there and sleep in my bed?" He paused and began to coax. Charlotte could have told her how beguiling he was when he coaxed. "I'll stay in the other room and keep an eye out. I sha'n't sleep. I won't even disturb you by tending the fire. You can do that. Come, is it a bargain. It's the only safe thing to do, you know. Suppose he should come up here in the night?"

"That's it," she said quietly. "S'pose he should? Do you want I should be found up here with a man, any man, even you?"

He was silent, struck by her bitter logic. His heart, in the actual physical state of it, ached for her. She would not let him save her, he thought despairingly; indeed, perhaps she could not. For she alone knew the noisome perils of her way. He relinquished his proposition, without comment, and he could see at once what relief that gave her.

"Very well," he said, "I'll go down. But I shall certainly come back and bring you some milk. Something to heat it in, too. Old Crow used to have dishes, but they're gone. Lock the door after me. I'll call when I come."

But she rose from her seat, put the baby on the couch and took the blanket from the chair where he had spread it. There were still drops on it, and she went to the other side of the room, at a safe distance from the baby, and shook it. She had settled into a composure as determined as his own.

"It's no use talkin'," she said. "I've got to go back."

"Go back?" He stared at her.

"Yes. What we've just said shows me. Nothin's more likely than his comin' up here. He might reason it out. He knows I wouldn't go to any o' the neighbors, an' he'd know I wouldn't let baby ketch his death, a night like this, the storm an' all. An' if he found me here locked in, even if there wa'n't nobody here with me, I dunno what he'd do. Burn the house down, I guess, over my head."

The last she said absently. She was arranging the blanket about her with an anxious care, evidently making it so secure that she need not use her hands in holding. They would be given to the baby.

"Burn my house down, will he? Let him try it," said Raven, under his breath.

She looked at him in a calm-eyed reproach that was all motherly.

"We mustn't have no trouble," said she. "I dunno what I should do if I brought that on you."

"What does the man mean," Raven broke out, chiefly to attract her attention and keep her there under shelter, "by going dotty half the time and the other half butting in and asking people if they're saved?"

"Did he ask you?" she inquired. She nodded, as if it were precisely what might have been expected. "I s'pose he thinks he has to. He's a very religious man."

"Religious!" Raven muttered. "Does he have to do the other thing, too: go off his nut?"

She was looking at him gravely. Suddenly it came to him he must be more sympathetic in his attitude. He must not let her feel rebuffed, thinking he did not understand.

"I dunno's I blame him," she said slowly, as if she found it a wearingly difficult matter and meant to be entirely just. "You see he had provocation." The red came flooding into her cheeks. "He come home from work an' what should he see but the man, the one I told you——"

She stopped, and Raven supplied, in what he hoped was an unmoved manner:

"The one that looks up kinder droll?"

For his life he could not have helped repeating the words as she had given them to him. He had found them too poignant in their picturesque drama to be paraphrased or forgotten.

"Yes," she said eagerly. She was relieved to be helped. "He drove up in his sleigh, about fifteen minutes 'fore Isr'el come home. He come up to the house. I went to the door. 'What do you want?' I says. Then he begun to say things, foolish things same's he always did——"

She stumbled there, as if in shame, and Raven knew what kind of things they were: things about her eyes, her lips, insulting things to an honest wife, taunting things, perhaps, touching the past. More and more she seemed to him like a mother of sorrows, a child unjustly scourged into the dark mysteries of passion and pain.

"Never mind," he said reassuringly. "Don't try to tell me. Don't think of them."

But she would tell him. It seemed as if she had to justify herself.

"He told me he wanted to come in. 'You can't,' says I, 'not whilst I live.' An' he laughed an' stood there an' dug his heel into the snow an' waited, kinder watchin' the road till Isr'el hove in sight with his dinner pail. An' then I see it all. He'd drove along that way an' see Isr'el an' Jerry comin' acrost from their work an' he meant to stan' there drivin' me out o' my senses till Isr'el see him. An' soon as he was sure Isr'el did see him, he turned an' run for the sleigh an' got in an' give the hoss a cut, an' he was off same's he meant to be."

"And you were left alone with Tenney," said Raven quietly. "There! don't tell me any more."

She smiled upon him, giving him an ineffable sense that she had, in telling him, somehow dropped her burden. Now she said, with as calm a resolution as that of the martyr marching to the fire he is sure his Lord has called him to:

"I'll go down along."

She went over to the couch, took up the child, and began to tuck about him the folds of her enveloping blanket. Raven moved to her side. He had an overwhelming sense of their being at one in the power of their resolution. If she would yield to his deliberate judgment! if only their resolutions could coincide!

"No," he said, "you're not going down there. I won't have it."

She looked at him and faintly smiled.

"I've got to," she said. "If I stay away all night an' he don't know where, there wouldn't be any way o' piecin' on."

And suddenly he knew, if she was to persist in "piecing on," she was right.

"Wait," he said. "Let me think."

There must be some way, he reflected, some means, by violence or diplomacy, to help her fulfill the outer rites of her bargain until he could persuade her to be taken beyond the reach of persecution. He wanted to fight for her; but if that was not the way, if his fists would only bruise her as well as Tenney, he was ready to lie. He had his idea. It might be good, it might not, but it was an emergency idea.

"I'll go down," he said. "I'll go over to your house and offer to pay him for his week's work. You follow. Give me time enough to go into my house on the way and get some money. Then you come while I'm talking to him and I'll stay a bit, as long as I can. When you come, we can see how he is. If he's violent to you—if he looks it, even—you've got to come away."

"Oh, no," she cried sharply, "I can't do that. You must see I can't."

"I'll take you to my house," he said. "You know Charlotte. She'll be nice to you. Why, if Charlotte found out a thing like this was going on in the neighborhood, she'd go for him tooth and nail."

"No," said she, in a dull decision. "I can't. It would all come on you."

He understood. The madman would drag him into that range of jealous fury and because he was a man.

"I can look out for myself," he said roughly, "and you, too."

Again she shook her head.

"No," she said, "he might kill you. Anyways, he'd burn your barn."

"He won't kill me," said Raven, "and I don't care a hang about my barn. Let him burn. Good thing. I'll clap him into jail and you'll know where he is. Now!" He looked at the clock on the mantel. "I'm going. In just twenty minutes you start and come along as fast as you want to. I'll be at your house."

She had begun to speak, but he paid no attention. He turned up his collar and stepped out into the storm.

"Lock the door," he called back to her. "Keep it locked till you go."

The road down the slope was scarcely clogged at all. The firs, waving now and interlocking their branches in that vague joy or trouble of the winter wind, were keeping off the powdery drift. When he got to his house he saw Jerry on the way to the barn, but he did not hail him. Possibly Jerry had paid Tenney for his week, and although Raven's own diplomacy would stick at nothing, he preferred to act in good faith, possibly so that he might act the better. He smiled a little at that and wondered, in passing, if he were never to be allowed any arrogance of perfect behavior, if he had always got to be so sorry for the floating wisps of humanity that seemed to blow his way as to go darting about, out of his own straight course, to pluck them back to safety. There were serious disadvantages, he concluded, as he often had before, in owning a feminine vein of temperament. He went in at the front door and up the stairs, took a roll of money from his desk and ran down again. Charlotte had not seen him. She was singing in the kitchen in a fragmentary way she had when life went well with her, and the sound filled Raven with an unreasoning anger. Why should any woman, even so dear and all deserving as Charlotte, live and thrive in the warmth and light while that other creature, of as simply human cravings, battled her way along from cliff to cliff, with the sea of doom below, beating against the land that was so arid to her and waiting only to engulf her? That, he thought, was another count in his indictment against the way things were made.

The Tenney house, when he approached it, was cold in the darkness of the storm. The windows were inhospitably blank, and his heart fell with disappointment. He went up to the side door looking out on the pile of wood that was the monument to Tenney's rages, and knocked sharply. No one came. He knocked again, and suddenly there was a clatter within, as if some one had overturned a chair, and steps came stumbling to the door. A voice came with them, Tenney's voice.

"That you?" he called.

He called it three times. Then he flung open the door and leaned out and, from his backward recoil, Raven knew he had hoped unreasonably to find his wife, knocking at her own door. Raven kicked his feet against the step, with an implication of being snow-clogged and cold.

"How are you?" he said. "Let me come in, won't you? It's going to be an awful night."

Tenney stepped back, let him enter, and closed the door behind him. They stood together in the darkness of the entry. Raven concluded he was not to be told which way to go.

"Smells warm in here," he said, taking a step to the doorway at the left. "This the kitchen?"

Tenney recovered herself.

"Walk in," he said. "I'll light up."

Raven, standing in the spacious kitchen, all a uniform darkness, it was so black outside, could hear the man breathe in great rasping gulps, as if he were recovering from past emotion or were still in its grasp. He had taken a lamp down from the high mantel and set it on the table. Now he was lighting it, and his hand shook. The lamp burning and bringing not only light but a multitude of shadows into the kitchen, he turned upon Raven.

"Well," he said, harshly. "Say it. Git it over."

Raven heard in his voice new signs of a tremendous, almost an hysterical excitement. It had got, he knew, to be quieted before she came.

"If you'll allow me," he said, "I'll sit down. I'm devilish cold."

"Don't swear," said Tenney, still in that sharp, exasperated voice, and Raven guessed he was nervously afraid, at such a crisis, of antagonizing the Most High.

The vision of his own grandmother came up before him, she who would not let him read a child's book in a thunder shower lest God should consider the act too trivial in the face of elemental threatening and strike him dead. He took one of the straight-backed chairs by the stove and leaned forward with an absorbed pretense of warming his chilled hands. But he was not reassuring Tenney. He was still more exasperating him.

"Say it, can't you?" the man cried to him piercingly. "Tell it an' git it over." Then, as Raven merely looked at him in a civil inquiry, "You've got suthin' to break, ain't ye? Break it an' leave me be."

Raven understood. The man's mind was on his wife, fled out into the storm. His inflamed imagination was picturing disaster for her. He was wild with apprehension. And it was well he should be wild. It was a pity she was likely to come so soon. Raven would have been glad to see his emotions run the whole scale from terror to remorse before she came, if come she would, to allay them.

"No," he said quietly, "I haven't anything to break. But it's going to be an awful night. I guess there will be things to break about the folks that are out in it."

Tenney came up to him and peered down at him in blank terror.

"Who's out in it?" he asked. "Who've you seen?"

Raven laughed jarringly. It did seem to him grimly amusing to be dallying thus with a man's fears. He was not used to playing games with the human creature's destiny. He had always looked too seriously on all such drama, perhaps because he had been so perplexed by drama of his own. If his life was too puzzling a thing to be endured, was not all life, perhaps, equally puzzling and therefore too delicate a matter to be meddled with? But now the game was on, the game of sheer diplomacy. The straight and obvious path wouldn't do if he was to save a woman who handicapped him in advance by refusing to let herself be saved.

"The night?" he repeated. "Who's out in it? Why, I'm out in it myself; at least, I have been. But now I'm here by this stove, I don't know when you'll get rid of me. Put in a stick, won't you, Tenney? These big rooms have a way of cooling off before you know it."

Tenney did put in a stick and more. He crammed the stove with light stuff and opened draughts. Raven noted, in the keen way his mind had taken up, of snatching at each least bit of safety for the woman, that the tea kettle was boiling. She would be chilled. She would need hot water. And suddenly he felt the blood in his face. There was a hand at the latch of the side door. Tenney, too, heard it. He threw back into the box the stick of wood he had selected and made three strides to the entry. Again he called, in that voice of sharp anxiety:

"That you?"

She opened the door just before he could put out his hand to it, passed him without a look, and came in. He shut the door and followed her. Raven got up from his chair and stood, glancing at her with what he hoped was a casual attention. Tenney came back and, when she had thrown off the blanket, took it from her hand and dropped it on a chair. He was all trembling eagerness. That act, the relieving her of the blanket, was incredible to Raven. The man had wanted to kill her (or, at the least, to kill his child), and he was humbly inducting her into the comforts of her home. She had not looked toward Raven. With a decorum finer, he thought, than his own, she would not play the game of diplomacy. She knew him and she could not deny him, even to save her life. Suddenly Tenney, brushing past to draw up a chair for her at the stove, became aware of him. Raven believed that, up to the moment, he had, to the man's absorbed gaze, been invisible. Now Tenney seemed to recognize the decencies toward even an unbidden guest.

"She's all beat out," he said, in uncouth apology. "It's my woman."

Raven turned to her, waiting for her cue. Would she take a hand at the game, as it imposed itself on him? Her silence and aloofness were his answer. She was sitting forward in her chair, to get the baby's feet nearer the warmth. But since she would not speak, Raven did.

"I should think any one would be beat out, a night like this," he said, as casually as he could manage, "carrying a baby, too, in such a storm. You'd better be careful of the child, at least," he added curtly, turning to Tenney, "if you want to keep him. Out in this cold and sleet! You don't want their deaths on your hands, do you?"

Tenney stared back at him in a wildness of apprehension.

"Be you a doctor?" he managed to ask.

Raven remembered the words: "Their tongue cleaved to the roof of their mouth." That seemed to be what Tenney's tongue was doing now.

"No," said he, "I'm not a doctor, but I've seen a good deal of sickness in the War. Get them warm," he added authoritatively, "both of them. Put the child into warm water."

"Yes," said Tenney, in an anguished sort of haste. Then to his wife he continued, in a humility Raven noted as her best guaranty of at least temporary safety, "I'll bring you the foot tub, an' whilst you're doin' it, I'll warm the bed."

"Yes," she said quietly, but with a composure of mastery in her voice. "So do."

Raven got up and made his way to the door. Then he bethought himself that he had not given any reason for coming and that Tenney might remember it afterward and wonder.

"I thought I'd run up," he said, "and pay you for your week's work."

Tenney was darting about with a small tin tub, filling it from the kettle and trying the temperature with his hand.

"No," he answered absorbedly, "I can't bother with that to-night. Let it be till another time."

He had drawn a chair to his wife's side and set the tub on it, and now she also tried the temperature while he watched her anxiously. And at once the baby who, in his solemnity of silence, had seemed to Raven hitherto little more than a stage property, broke into a lusty yelling, and Tenney put out his hands to him, took him to his shoulder and began to walk the floor, while the woman poured more water into the tub. Neither of them had a look for Raven, and he went out into the blustering night with a picture etched so deeply on his brain that he knew it would always be there while he, in his flesh, survived: the old picture of the sacred three, behind the defenses of their common interests, the father, mother and the child.

XIV

All that night Raven, through his light sleep, had a consciousness of holding on to himself, refusing to think, refusing angrily to fear. The sleep seemed to him like a thin, slippery coating over gulfs unplumbed; it was insecure, yet it failed to let him down into blessed depths of oblivion below. But he would not think to no purpose (he had a dread of the wild, disordered clacking of the wheels in unproductive thought), and he would not invite again the strange humiliation, the relief tinged by aversion, that came over him when he felt, on leaving them, the inviolability of the three in their legal bond. She had looked to him so like heaven's own, he had upborne her in his thought almost to the gate of heaven itself; and yet she was walled in by a bond she would not repudiate with the brute who persecuted her. In spite of her uncouth speech, in spite of her ignorance of delicate usage, she seemed to him a creature infinitely removed from the rougher aspects of this New England life; yet there she was in one of the most sordid scenes of it, and she was absorbed by it, she fitted it as a Madonna fits a cave. And what business had he, he asked angrily, to weave about her the web of a glorifying sympathy, exalting her only from that pernicious habit of his of being sorry? Yet, as he thought it, he knew she was different from the ordinary country woman afraid of her man, and that any fine mantle he wove for her could not equal the radiance of her pure courage and undaunted truth.

Once he rose from his bed and began to dress hastily, with what he recognized at the same moment as the wild purpose of slipping out of the house and going up to Tenney's, to see if there was a light or to listen for the catamount voice. But that, he realized immediately, was folly. Suppose Tenney saw him. What reason could he plant in the man's inflamed mind, except one more hostile to her peace? So he went back to bed, chilled, and was savagely glad of his discomfort. It gave him something, however trivial, to think about besides the peril of a woman who looked like motherhood incarnate, and so should have been heir to all the worship and chivalry of men. With the first light he was up and had built his fire, and Charlotte, hearing him, got, sooner than was her wont, out of her warm bed. Charlotte owned to liking to "lay a spell" in winter, to make up for the early activities of summer mornings when you must be "up 'fore light" to keep pace with the day. For after nine o'clock "the day's 'most gone." She looked up at him as he came into the kitchen where she was brashing her fire for a quick oven, and he found her eyes clearly worried in their questioning.

"No toast, Charlotte," he said. He wondered if even his voice was trembling in his haste. "No biscuits. I'm going up to the hut."

Charlotte nodded and seemed to settle into understanding. She had a sympathetic, almost a reverent tolerance for the activities of pen and ink. To her, Raven was a well-beloved and in no wise a remarkable being until he stepped into the clouded room of literary activity. There she would have indulged him in any whim or unaccountable tyranny. Charlotte had never heard of temperament, but she believed in it. Once only did she speak to him while he was drinking his coffee:

"You got any ink up there?"

He started and looked at her a moment, dazed. Nothing was further from his mind than ink. Other liquids, tears, waters of lethe, lakes of fire and brimstone would not have sounded foreign to his thought. But ink! how incalculably far was the life of the written word from this raw anguish of reality he was caught in to-day! He recovered himself instantly.

"I've got my pen," he told her, "my stylograph."

And presently he had put on his coat, bidden her a hasty good-by and was plunging up the slope. Somehow, though the crest of the wave had been reached the night before and that usually, Tira had assured him, meant a following calm, he was certain of seeing her to-day. It was not that he wanted to see her, but an inner conviction, implacably fixed as the laws of nature that are at no point subject to the desires of man, told him she would come. The hut must be warm for her. The fire must be relaid. And, he told himself grimly, the apex had been reached. The end of the thing was before them. He must not yield to her again. He must command her, persuade and conquer her. She must let him send her away.

At the hut he almost expected to see her footprints in the light snow by the door. But the exquisite softness lay untouched. The day was a heaven of clearness, the shadows were deep blue and the trees beginning the slow waving motion of their majestic secrecies. He took out the key from under the stone, went in and made his fire with a hand too practiced to lose in efficacy from its haste. Presently it was roaring upward and, after a glance about to see that the room was not in any disorder too great for him to remedy quickly, he walked back and forth, and whenever it died down enough to let him, fed the fire. It began to seem to him as if he were going to be there days feeding the fire to keep her warm, but it was only a little before ten when he heard a step and his heart choked him with its swelling of relief. At once he was also calmer. A moment ago even, he would have wondered how he could meet her, how keep the storm of entreaty out of his voice if he was to beg her to let him save her. But now he knew he should be himself as she had briefly known him and though he must command, he should in no sense offend. He stood still by the fire, half turning toward the door, to wait. It was an unformulated delicacy of his attitude toward her that she should not find him going forward to meet her as if she were a guest. She should enter as if the house were her own. But she did not enter. There was a hand at the door. It knocked. Then he called:

"Come in."

The door opened, under what seemed to him, in his first surprise, a halting hand and a woman stepped in. It was Nan. She came a hesitating pace into the room and stood looking at him, after the one interested glance about her, smiling a little, half quizzically, as if aware she had brought a surprise and yet not in doubt of its being welcome. Raven stared back at her for one bewildered minute and then, so instant and great was the revulsion, burst into a shout of laughter. Nan stood there and laughed with him.

"What is it, Rookie?" she asked, coming forward to him. "I'm funny, I suppose, but not so funny as all that. What's the joke?"

She was a finished sort of creature to come into his wood solitude, and yet an outdoor creature, too, with her gray fur cap and coat. She looked younger, less worn than when he saw her last, perhaps because her cheeks were red from the frosty air and her eyes bright at finding him.

"Let me have your coat," he said. "Come to the fire."

She took off her coat and he dropped it on the couch. He pulled a chair nearer the hearth (it was his own chair, not Tira's), and motioned her to it. She did not sit. She put out her thickly shod foot to the blaze and then withdrew it, for she was all aglow from her plunge up the hill, and turned to him, her brows knitted, her eyes considering.

"What is it, Rookie?" she asked. "Something's up and you wish I hadn't come. That it?"

"I haven't had time to wish you hadn't come," he said. He had to be straight with her. "I never was more surprised in my life. You were the last person I expected to see."

"But why d'you laugh, Rookie?" she persisted, and then, as he hesitated, evidently considering exactly why he did and what form he could put it in, she concluded: "I know. You were taken aback. I've done the same thing myself, often. Well!" She seemed to dismiss it as unimportant and began where she had evidently meant to begin. "Now I'll tell you what I'm here for."

"Sit down, Nan," he bade her.

Now that his first derangement was over, he was glad to see her. Tira might not come. If she did, he could do something. He could even, at a pinch and with Tira's consent, put the knowledge of the tawdry business into Nan's hands. But she would not sit down. Plainly she had received a setback. She was refusing to accept his hospitality to any informal extent. And he saw he had hurt her. He was always reading the inner minds of people, and that was where his disastrous sympathy was forever leading him: to that pernicious yielding, that living of other people's lives and not his own.

"It was only," he said, trying to pick up the lost thread of her confidence, "that I didn't expect you. I couldn't have dreamed of your coming. How did you come so early?"

"Took the early train," said Nan curtly.

"Not the beastly old thing that starts before light?"

She nodded.

"What for?"

"To get ahead of them," she answered, still curtly.

"Them? Who?"

"Dick and his mother and Doctor Brooke."

"Dick and Amelia? What's Amelia on here for?"

He had half expected her and yet, in the new turmoil about him, he had actually forgotten she might come.

"Because Dick sent her your letter. They both assume you've broken down, and she's called in an alienist to come up here and eye you over, and Dick's pretty sick over the whole business; so he's coming along, too. He was prepared for mother, I fancy, but not the alienist."

"But what's it all for?"

"Why, you know, Rookie. You've broken down."

Raven stared at her. Then he laughed.

"Well," he said, "let 'em come. Charlotte'll give 'em some dinner and they can look at the mountain and go back on the six to-night."

"That's precisely what they won't do," said Nan, her lips tightening. "At least your sister. She's going to stay."

"The deuce she is," said Raven. "What for?"

Then Nan did break out of the stiffness that seemed to have held her like an armor since the momentary setback of her coming. Her own laugh ran over her face and creased it into delighted merriment.

"Why, don't you see?" she asked him. "To brighten your life."

Raven's eyes met hers with a rueful terror. He reached, at a leap, the motive for her coming.

"And you rushed off up here to tell me," he said. "Dear Nan! Good child! But you don't mean they're actually coming to-day?"

"Of course I do," she said impatiently. "Didn't I tell you so? They were going to take the nine. They're well on the way. They'll get a pung or something at the station and be driving up to the house presently, and your sister'll give Charlotte the hamper of provisions she brought and tell her there'll be four to dinner. There'll be five, though. She didn't know that. She didn't hear about me. I s'pose you'll ask me to stay."

Raven put out his hand and stroked her sleeve. This was the first time she had seemed to him a woman grown. When she came back from school, those years ago, she had changed to girlhood. It was the girl always even when she came home from France with a world of hideous memories sealed away in her heart and brain. They had not, these memories, seemed so much as to scar her, she had obliterated them so carefully by the decorum of her desire to make the world no sadder by her knowledge. But now, at some call, the call of his personal extremity perhaps, she looked suddenly forceful and mature, as if her knowledge of life had escaped her restraining hand and burst out to the aid of a knowledge of him.

"I don't exactly know," he said, "what to do with them. I don't mind the alienist of course; but what do you suppose put it into her head—Amelia's—to bring him along?"

"Why," said Nan, "it's precisely the thing she would do. Don't you see? She does everything by rule, by theory, the most modern, most advanced. When Dick wrote her, she made up her mind like a shot. She had to put you in a pigeon hole. Shell shock, cafard! So the next thing was to set a specialist on the job. And there you are."

Raven grinned. The whole thing was more and more fantastic to him.

"I wonder how Dick likes the hornet's nest," he reflected, "now he's stirred it up."

"I can tell you," said Nan, a little white coming round her lips, as it did when she was excited, "how he liked me. He told me the whole business last night and I went for him. I told him he was a fool, a plain downright fool, and he'd seen his last of me till he got us out of the mess he'd got us into: you, me, and incidentally himself."

"It is mighty nice of you to come into it," said Raven.

"Well, how could I help it?" she asked impetuously, "when you're in? Why, Rookie, wouldn't you——"

There she stopped, and Raven answered the implication.

"You bet I would. What concerns you concerns me. But I'd no business to assume it's the other way about. That is, when it's Dick. You're bound, you know," he said, in a tentative way he thought he ought to venture and yet not quite sure of it, "to stand by Dick."

Nan turned a little, to look at him fully. She seemed to be angry now, and well it became her.

"Why am I?" she demanded. "Why am I bound to stand by Dick? I'm bound to nothing, with any man, Dick least of all, if he won't devote some of his surplus energy to growing up. So I've told him. He's got to grow up." But suddenly she seemed to recall herself to another question, put her personal anger aside and veered to that. "Rookie," she said, "what about Aunt Anne's will?"

"Anne's will?" he repeated, staring at her. "Well, what about it?"

"You've had notice of it, haven't you?" she asked. "Official notice, that is?"

"Oh, yes," he said, "before I left town. Whitney went over the whole ground." But he said it as if it did not interest him to any degree. And yet, as she amazedly thought, it had, the last time she saw him, interested him to the exclusion of everything else.

"I thought I'd remind you," she said, "that it's been in the papers. You are Miss Anne Hamilton's residuary legatee. Dick knows it. So does your sister. She'll ask you things. I thought if you'd made up your mind to refuse it or, in short, anything about it, you'd want to be prepared for her. Those questions of hers—you can't evade them. They go to the bottom of your soul—and then some."

"Oh," said Raven dazedly, recalling himself to a complexity he had all but forgotten. "So they do. I dare say she will ask me. But I don't—Nan, to tell the truth, I haven't thought of it at all."

The inevitable comment sprung up in Nan's mind, as if his words had touched a spring, releasing it:

"What have you been thinking then?"

And as if in exact comment upon that, came a sound at the door, a knock, a hand on the latch and Tira stepped in. Nan turned sharply, and Raven had only to lift his eyes to see the picture his mind had painted for him. There she was, a little color in her cheeks from the air, her eyes heavy, as if she had not slept. She carried the child in his little white coat and cap, showing, Raven concluded, that she had not been forced to leave the house in desperate haste. For an instant she confronted Nan; the life in her face seemed to go out and leave her haggard. Then, before Raven could take more than the one step forward to meet her, she had turned and shut the door behind her.

"Wait for me," he threw back over his shoulder at Nan and ran out.

XV

Tira was hurrying through the snowy track, ankle deep at every step. Raven, bareheaded, ran after. In a minute he had overtaken her.

"Stop!" he called, breathless, more from his emotion than from haste. "Stop! I tell you."

She did stop, and he came up with her. Now, at last, there were tears in her eyes, and he thought angrily that he had been the one to overthrow her control more absolutely than the danger she apprehended. He had, he thought, in this unreasoning anger, promised her asylum in the hut and she found it invaded. But curiously he did not think of Nan, who had come uninvited and scared the poor fugitive away. Nan, child and woman, was always negligible, too near him to be dealt with. But he had offered this woman the safety of a roof and walls, and she had fled out of it. At sight of his face, its contrite kindliness, her own set again into its determined composure. She seemed to see that she could not count on aid outside herself and returned again uncomplainingly to her old equilibrium of endurance.

"Come back," he said. "She's going down to the house with me. Besides, if she did stay, you'd like her. You'd love her. That's only Nan."

He said "Nan" of set purpose. It was the custom of this country folk, when they talked among themselves, to call all alike by their Christian names, even when they scrupulously used the surname in direct address. He meant to reassure her. It was a way of bringing Nan into a friendly nearness.

"You've heard of her," he said, "Miss Hamilton's niece. She owns the next house to mine, the Hamilton house. She'll be here this summer. You'll be neighbors. Come back and speak to her."

"No," said Tira, in a gentle obstinacy. "I guess I'll be gittin' along toward——"

Here she stopped. She did not know what the direction or the end of her journey was to be.

"You're not going off the place," said Raven bluffly. "That's flat. The place is mine and you're safe on it. Do you want to go traipsing round the woods in this snow"—he fell purposely into the country habit of speech—"and get wet to your knees and have a cold?"

"I sha'n't have a cold," she said, smiling dimly at him and looking, as he realized, like a mother who was sorry her son could not have all he grasped at, but still remained immovable. "I don't hardly remember havin' one since I was little."

The child had resumed the rôle of Buddhistic calm temporarily abandoned last night when he screamed out his distaste for earthly complications, and Raven, glancing at the solemn blue eyes, saw that the only hope of moving her lay in him.

"Do you want," he shot at random, "to have the baby get chilled—and hungry?" There he broke off, though he saw that did move her. He had to know from what extremity she fled. "Has this been going on all night?" he asked.

"No," she said, with the same air of gently reassuring him. "I slept 'most all night. So did he, Mr. Tenney, I guess. An' we started out all right this mornin'. But after he'd read the chapter an' prayed, it all come over him ag'in, an' I had to go."

"After he'd read his chapter," said Raven. "And prayed! God!"

The invocation sounded as if he also prayed.

"This time," she continued, "he—he seemed to have a realizin' sense."

She paused a perplexed moment. In the little she had said to Raven, he had noted from the first that she was often blocked by a difficulty in finding words she thought adequate. "He seemed to know what was comin'," she said. "He give me warnin'."

"Warning?"

"Yes. He come in an' he says to me, 'You don't want to go traipsin' round in this snow.'"

Raven noted the word and smiled slightly. He and Tenney were at one in their care for her.

"'You go up chamber,' he says, 'an' have a fire in the air-tight an' turn the key. I dunno,' he says, 'what's goin' to happen, this day. I dunno.'"

"Why didn't you?" asked Raven.

"I didn't hardly dast to," she said, with her clear look at him. "I knew if he knew I's up there he never could stan' it till he—broke in the door."

Raven could only look at her.

"Besides," she said, "even if I be safer in the house, I don't feel so, somehow. I've always lived a good deal out door."

"So you came away," said Raven quietly. "You came here." The words really were, "You came to me," but he would not say them.

"I did lock the chamber door," she said, "jest as he said. But I locked it on the outside an' took away the key. I thought he'd think I was there an' it might keep him out a spell, an' when he did git in, it'd give him a kind of a shock an' bring him to. It does," she added simply. "It always gives him a shock, not findin' me. He's asked me over 'n' over ag'in, when he come to, not to make way with myself, but I never'd answer. He's got it before him, an' that's about all there is in my favor, far as I can see."

The gentle monotony of her voice was maddening to Raven; it brought him such terrible things, like a wind carrying the seeds of some poisonous plant that, if they were allowed to spring up, would overrun the world of his hopes for her.

"You wouldn't promise him," he said thickly, "but you'll promise me. Promise me now. Whatever happens to you, you won't make way with yourself."

"Why, of course I sha'n't," she said, as if in some surprise that he should ask it. "How could I? Not while there's baby."

This threw him back to the sanity of their common cause. They were both to fight, he for her and she for the mother's one absorbing task: the child. He returned to his old grave way with her.

"Now," he said, "you're going to do exactly what I tell you. If you won't go back to the hut and see Nan, you're to stay here until I've got Nan and taken her down to the house. And we sha'n't come up here at all, unless I come to bring you something to eat."

"I don't want," she hesitated, "to put her out."

"Nan? You don't put her out. She only came because she didn't find me at the house. If you don't do precisely what I tell you, that'll be putting everybody out. I shall make an awful row. Do you hear me?"