ief. 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
att