t 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