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 t