s will be?"

Raven looked at her in a maze of interrogation. Was this the fragility
of girlhood speaking, or was it womanhood, old as time itself, with the
knowledge of good and evil? She answered the look.

"No," she said, "I'm not a kid. Don't think it. I suppose it's because
I've seen--life."

The pause before the last word, the drop on the word itself was not from
bitterness, he knew. But it was sad.

"Well," he said irrepressibly, "you've seen life, and what do you think
of it?"

She hesitated. Then she put out her hand and touched the petal of a
rose, one of a great dome of splendor in a bowl.

"I like--roses," she said whimsically.

She looked at him with that most moving look of a lovely face: the
knitted brows of rueful questioning, the smiling lips. Raven, staring
back at her, felt a sudden impulse to speak, to tell. It was the form of
her reply that invited him.

"I don't believe, Nan," he said, "I even care about roses. I don't care
about the whole infernal scheme. That's what I sent for Dick for--to
tell him. Practically, you know I should have to tell Dick. And I
haven't done it and now I'm telling you."

III

Nan sat looking at him with an air of patient alertness, ready, he saw,
to meet what he had to say and do the best she could with it. He had an
irritated apprehension that, as her work through the last few years had
lain chiefly in meeting emergencies, so now he was an emergency. And as
Dick, poet though the inner circle of journalism had listed him, might
not understand in the least what he was driving at, so there was danger
of Nan's understanding too quickly and too much, with the resultant
embarrassment of thinking something could be done. And nothing could be
done beyond the palliatives he meant to allow himself. He would try her.
He might see how far she would insist on going with him along his dreary
way. What if she had Anne's over-developed and thwarted maternity of
helpfulness? What if she insisted on going all the way and never leaving
him to the blessed seclusion of his own soul?

"You see, Nan," he adventured, "I'm sick of the whole show."

She nodded.

"Yes," she said, "I know. Coming back. Finding we aren't any better than
we were before we got frightened and said our prayers and promised God
if He'd stop the War we'd be different forever and ever, amen. That's
it, Rookie, isn't it?"

"Why, yes," said Raven, staring at her, she seemed so accurate,
according t