as thoroughly surprised
and very curious. "So it's for a cause. Aren't you glad, Rookie? A
minute ago you didn't want it. What is the cause?"

"The cause," said Raven, with infinite distaste, as if it galled him
even to say it, "is the cause of Peace."

"Good Lord!" said Nan breathlessly. "O my stars!" She thought of it a
moment, and he thought also, and then she gathered herself hopefully.
"But, Rookie dear, you believe in peace. You don't have to carry it out
in her way. You can carry it out in yours--and mine--and Dick's--we that
have seen things over there. Why, bless you, Rookie, it's a great idea.
It's a chance: Liberty enlightening the world! a big educational fund,
and you to administer it. Cheer up, Rookie dear. It's a chance."

"Oh, no, it's not a chance," said Raven bitterly. "She's seen to that.
She's tied me up, hand and foot. It's got to be done in her way, the way
she'd been doing it herself since 1914."

"The acutely sentimental?" asked Nan ruthlessly. Then the misery of his
face--a look, too, of mortification as if somebody had put him to public
shame--hurt her so that she spoke with an impetuous bitterness of her
own: "It was a cruel thing to do. Well, it was like her."

Raven put in heavily:

"She never meant to be cruel."

"No," said Nan, "but the whole thing--all the things she had to do
with--came out of her being absolutely stupid and absolutely sure she
was right."

Raven thought apathetically for a moment. His mind went plodding back
over the years of his acquaintance with Anne, as he had never meant it
should again. There had been moments, of late, when he wondered if he
need ever go back to that guiding hand of hers on his unresponsive life.
Of herself, he would have protested, he must have the decency to think.
Just now, recurring to that also, he wondered, with a grim amusement,
whether he had perhaps meant to set apart a day for it, say Thursdays
from ten to twelve, to think gratefully of Anne. But here he was again
at war with her, and the curious part of it seemed to be that he
couldn't undertake the warfare with the old, steady, hopeless
persistence he had got used to in their past; the mere thought of it had
roused him to a certain alarming wildness of revolt.

"Well," he found himself saying to Nan, because there might be a
propriety in curbing her impetuous conclusions, "she had a way of being
right--conventionally, you might say."

"Was she right about the War?" Nan threw