"

"You did, did you?" said Nan ungratefully. "Well, you'd better. You've
made enough mischief for one not very inventive young person, don't you
think? And wouldn't it seem to you you'd better use your influence with
your mother to-morrow morning and get out of here?"

"Out of here?" repeated Dick. "Out of my uncle's house. You
act----" here he paused.

"Yes," said Nan, "I do act precisely that way. I act as if I had more
right here than you. And I have. For I adore Rookie. And that gives me a
right to stay with him and fight for him, and die for him, if I want to.
And you don't care a sixpence, or you wouldn't have brought this on
him."

Dick, the man, cooled sooner than she. He paled, and stood looking at
her. Then he spoke in a voice dulled by wonder:

"I believe you do adore him."

"Of course I do," cried Nan, all her anger of impatience thrilling in
her voice. "I love him more than anything in this world or the next and
I always did and I always shall."

This Raven, coming back through the hall, heard.

"Good Lord!" he said to himself. "Good Lord!"

So these two, with all the forces of probability and beckoning fortune
pushing them together, could not approach even within hailing distance.
It was the hideous irony of a world bent on disorder. He walked in on
them with a consciously grave aspect of recalling them to their more
reasonable selves.

"What are you two scrapping for?" he inquired, and Nan looked at him
humbly. She hated to have him bothered by inconsiderable persons like
herself and Dick. "Don't you know you've got the universe in your fists
for the last time you'll ever have it? You're young----"

There he stopped awkwardly in the enumeration of their presumable
blessedness. It was Nan's face that stopped him. It had paled out into a
gravity surprising to him: a weariness he had often expected to see on
it after her work abroad, but had not yet found there.

"Yes," she said, in a tone that matched her tired face, "we're young
enough, if that's all."

The talk displeased her. Nan never liked people to be dull and smudgy
with disorderly moods. She kept a firm hand on her own emotions and
perhaps she could not remember a time when they had got away from her
under other eyes. Aunt Anne was partly responsible for that, and partly
the proud shyness of her type.

"No, Rookie," she said, "we won't fight. Not here, anyway. Not in your
house."

She held out a careless hand to Dick, who looked