lcome. 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