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 doub