edge. But
now, at some call, the call of his personal extremity perhaps, she
looked suddenly forceful and mature, as if her knowledge of life had
escaped her restraining hand and burst out to the aid of a knowledge of
him.

"I don't exactly know," he said, "what to do with them. I don't mind the
alienist of course; but what do you suppose put it into her
head--Amelia's--to bring him along?"

"Why," said Nan, "it's precisely the thing she would do. Don't you see?
She does everything by rule, by theory, the most modern, most advanced.
When Dick wrote her, she made up her mind like a shot. She had to put
you in a pigeon hole. Shell shock, _cafard_! So the next thing was to
set a specialist on the job. And there you are."

Raven grinned. The whole thing was more and more fantastic to him.

"I wonder how Dick likes the hornet's nest," he reflected, "now he's
stirred it up."

"I can tell you," said Nan, a little white coming round her lips, as it
did when she was excited, "how he liked me. He told me the whole
business last night and I went for him. I told him he was a fool, a
plain downright fool, and he'd seen his last of me till he got us out of
the mess he'd got us into: you, me, and incidentally himself."

"It is mighty nice of you to come into it," said Raven.

"Well, how could I help it?" she asked impetuously, "when you're in?
Why, Rookie, wouldn't you----"

There she stopped, and Raven answered the implication.

"You bet I would. What concerns you concerns me. But I'd no business to
assume it's the other way about. That is, when it's Dick. You're bound,
you know," he said, in a tentative way he thought he ought to venture
and yet not quite sure of it, "to stand by Dick."

Nan turned a little, to look at him fully. She seemed to be angry now,
and well it became her.

"Why am I?" she demanded. "Why am I bound to stand by Dick? I'm bound to
nothing, with any man, Dick least of all, if he won't devote some of his
surplus energy to growing up. So I've told him. He's got to grow up."
But suddenly she seemed to recall herself to another question, put her
personal anger aside and veered to that. "Rookie," she said, "what about
Aunt Anne's will?"

"Anne's will?" he repeated, staring at her. "Well, what about it?"

"You've had notice of it, haven't you?" she asked. "Official notice,
that is?"

"Oh, yes," he said, "before I left town. Whitney went over the whole
ground." But he said it as if it did not interes