d Raven, and got up, his mind suddenly dense to the
comfortable picture of Nan and her dinner, and went home.

XX

The next few days went by, all alike cloudless and uneventful within the
house. Nan coaxed Charlotte into bringing her over meat and vegetables,
and, with a plea of liking it, cooked them herself. Raven swung back and
forth between the houses, but Nan found him silent and, she decided,
cross. Every day he went up to the hut to see whether the fire had been
lighted, and every day found the place in its chilly order. It seemed to
him as if the whole tragic background against which Tira had been moving
had been wiped away by some wide sweeping sponge of oblivion, as if he
had dreamed the story or at least its importance in his own life, as if
Nan had always been living alone in her house, and Amelia, tied up in
Charlotte's aprons, her lips compressed in implacable resolution, always
going through trunks in the attic, searching for a mottled book. He had
no compunction over Amelia. Let her search, he thought, when Charlotte
came to him with a worried brow and asked if he didn't think he could
put it somewheres in sight, so's 't she should know 'twas no use. Do her
good. If she didn't like it she could go back to her clubs and her
eugenics and her Freudians. And when the evening of the prayer-meeting
came he looked out at the brilliant weather, judged that the immediate
region might seize upon it as an excuse for sleigh-riding, and was
returning to his book for a brief minute more, when Amelia called from
the window:

"Three sleighs! Where can they be going?"

"Oh," said Raven, without raising his eyes from the page, "sleighing,
most likely."

But the minute she left the window, he put down his book, got his hat
and coat from the hall, and went out through the kitchen where Charlotte
was sponging bread.

"Going to the meeting?" he asked her.

"No," said Charlotte, absorbedly dissolving her yeast cake. "I never
take much stock in----" There she paused, lest she might be uncharitably
expansive, and found refuge in Jerry. "He says Isr'el Tenney ain't so
much of a man, when all's said an' done, an' don't seem as if he could
stan' seein' him on his knees. But there!"

Raven went on through the shed and up the road, to Nan's. She had seen
him from the window and came down the path.

"Knew I'd come, did you?" he grumbled.

"Yes," said Nan. "We'd really better go."

Raven hated it all, out of his e