to the door and opened it and Charlotte appeared, done up in an
old-fashioned shawl and--Raven noted in an amused incredulity--a
nondescript knitted thing, old-fashioned when he was a child.

"A cloud," he said to himself. "That's what they called the thing."

He felt absurdly thankful at seeing it again. It seemed to assure him
that although the surface of life might heave and sink with revolution
and the fate of dynasties, Charlotte and her equipment of bed-rock
integrity and clouds existed still. She paused in the doorway to take a
basket from Jerry, and closed the door on him, after a casual
good-night. Raven went into the hall. The basket was generous, in its
oval capacity, the contents covered with a napkin.

"Want this carried upstairs?" he asked, but Charlotte shook her head.

"No," she said. "It's for her breakfast. I shall be gone 'fore light."
She lifted her sincere gaze to Raven. "I thought I'd come over," she
added. "I shouldn't feel easy to have her here all alone. Jerry said he
wanted I should."

Raven nodded at her and carried the basket off into the kitchen, and
when he came back both women were upstairs and he heard the interchange
of voices and their quick tread.

"'Night, Rookie," Nan broke off her housewifely deeds to call, and he
called back:

"Good night."

Then he went out and home again, and fulfilled his destiny for the day
by another somnolent hour with Milly before the fire.

XIX

Nan and Charlotte, each in a front chamber, were soon cozily in warmed
sheets. But when Nan judged Charlotte must be asleep, she got up, put
more wood on the dying fire, slipped on her fur coat over a wrapper, did
up her knees in a blanket and sat down by the window she had not yet
opened, in anticipation of this hour of the silent night. Really she had
lived for it, ever since she entered the hut and found the strange
woman. The night at Raven's house had been as still as this, but there
were invisible disturbances in the air; they riddled her chamber through
and pierced her brain: what Amelia thought, what Dick thought. Here
there was only the calm island of Charlotte's beneficence, and even that
lay stiller than ever under the blanket of a tranquil sleep. She felt
alone in a world that wasn't troubling itself about her, because it
never troubled itself about anything.

The moon was just up above the fringe of trees at the east and shadows
were black across the snow. She sat looking out with i