there was
anything in her conduct save the inevitable best, as ordered as the
stars. So, Raven knew, she had probably never talked over his nebulous
relation with her to Nan; but he was suddenly alive with curiosity to
know. He couldn't coax Nan into betraying that confidence, but he was
nevertheless set on getting at it somehow. He wondered if it might be
decent to do it by direct attack.

"Nan," said he, "just what was my relation to your Aunt Anne? What do
you assume it to have been?"

She looked at him as if in reproach, a hurt pride flushing her cheek and
giving a sort of wounded appeal to her glance.

"Why," she stumbled, "I know. Of course I know. Everybody did that heard
how long you'd been devoted to her."

This gave him so sharp a pang that it might almost have seemed she had
been told off to avenge some of Aunt Anne's wrongs of omission suffered
at his hands. He had never been devoted to her, even with his decent
show of deference in return for the benefits he had to reject. And now
Nan was accusing him of having kept up the relation he had been all his
life repudiating, and since Aunt Anne was gone (in the pathetic immunity
that shuts the lips of the living as it does those of the dead), he
could not repudiate it any more. Nan was looking at him now in her
clear-eyed gravity, but still with that unconscious implication of there
being something in it all to hurt her personally. The words came as if
in spite of her, so impetuously that she might easily not have seen how
significant they were:

"There's nothing to be ashamed of in not getting the woman you want,
especially with that reason. She adored you, Rookie. I know she did. And
it was pretty heroic in her to keep her mind fixed on all those years
between you. I wouldn't, I can tell you. Do you s'pose I'd let a matter
of fourteen years keep me from the only man? No, sir. Not me."

They sat gazing at each other, she as self-willed as her words and he
abjectly afraid of her finding out. Why? He could not have told. But it
did seem as if he must protect Anne, in the shadows where she lived now,
from the flashing directness of this terrible young glance. It was all
he could do for her. It was bad enough to have Nan build up a beautiful
dream house of eternal love and renunciation. It was infinitely worse to
be the cause of her demolishing it. And as his eyes, in sheer terror of
leaving her to reflect any more astutely and productively on this, held
her