ntentness as if
she were there at the window for the sole purpose of watching the silent
world, but really to get her mind in order for the next day and all the
coming days. She felt about the heart the strange dropping we know as
grief. No wonder the mortal creature, looking on at the commotions
within the frail refuge of his body, should have evolved the age-old
phrase that the heart bleeds. Nan's heart had been bleeding a long time.
There used to be drops on each shock of her meeting Raven after absence
and finding herself put away from the old childish state of delighted
possession. At first, she had believed this was one of the mysterious
cruelties of Aunt Anne's inexorable delicacy of behavior; but when she
grew older she had one day a great happy light of understanding, one of
those floods that sweep over youth after washing at the barriers of its
innocence. Rookie himself had put her away. It was one of the scrupulous
things he had done for her, because she had been too ignorant to do them
for herself. He had seen she was grown-up. It was true, Nan had to own,
that this was one of the lines, drawn across her life, that pleased Aunt
Anne most, because it removed her (or seemed to remove her) from Rookie.
Aunt Anne was jealous to her fingertips, the ends of those beautiful,
delicately prisoning hands. Nan had tried never to acknowledge that. It
always seemed such a barbarity to find in Aunt Anne the things that
would have shocked her in herself.

To-night she looked it in the face. Aunt Anne was jealous. That was the
first count. All her own life, too, Nan had been vaguely irritated by
Raven's not marrying Aunt Anne. He was her property, wasn't he, in a
queer way, never questioned, never, on his part, rebelled against? Yet
it was a bondage. And if the real reason was that Aunt Anne wouldn't
have him, why didn't he play the man and batter down her scruples, even
that barrier of the years between them? But after that sudden look into
Raven's eyes, the night she told him about the will, she had never been
able to think of him as loving Aunt Anne at all. It was that horrible
compassion of his, she believed, that obedience of the male to the
weaker (and yet the stronger) principle of the demanding opposite. He
had always been in bondage through his affections, first to his mother,
then Aunt Anne, and then suddenly, terrifyingly, but most gloriously
because this was the only wildly spontaneous thing of all, to the
stran