erested, forced to switch his mind from the pulsating dreams of youth
to worn mottled covers?

"What is it?" he asked indifferently.

Raven was rather curious now. What impression would Old Crow make,
slipping in like this, unheralded?

"Never mind," he said. "Run over it and get on to it, if you can. I'd
like to know what you think."

Dick, without much heart, began to read, and Raven lighted a pipe.
First, a tribute to Nan's abstinence, he passed her the cigarettes, and
when she shook her head, smiled back at her, as if he reminded her of
secrets they had together. Presently she got up, and Dick, closing the
book, threw it on the table.

"Bed?" Raven asked, also getting up, and Nan said good night and was
gone.

The two men sat down, each with the certainty that here they were to
stick until something determining had been said, Raven irritated by the
prospect and Dick angrily ready.

"Well," said Raven, indicating the book, "what do you think?"

"That?" said Dick absently. "Oh, I don't know. Somebody trying to write
without knowing how?"

Raven gave it up. Either he had not read far, or he had not hungered or
battled enough to be moved by it.

"Now, look here," said Dick, "I may not be interested in that, but
there's something I am interested in. And we've got to talk it out, on
the spot."

"Well!" said Raven. He mended the fire which didn't need it, and then
sat down and filled his pipe. He wasn't smoking so very much but, he
thought, with a bored abandonment to the situation, gratefully taking
advantage of a pipe's proneness to go out. While he attended to it he
could escape the too evidently condemnatory gaze from those young eyes
that never wavered, chiefly because they could not be deflected by a
doubt of perfectly apprehending everything they saw.

"Now," said Dick, plunging, "what do you want to do this kind of thing
for?"

"What kind of thing?" asked Raven, lighting up. "Smoke?"

Dick looked at him accusingly, sure of his own rightness and the clarity
of the issue.

"You know," he said. "This business. Compromising Nan."

Raven felt that slight quickening of the blood, the nervous thrill along
the spine a dog must feel when his hair rises in canine emergency. He
smoked silently while he was getting himself in hand, and, in the space
of it, he had time for a good deal of rapid thinking. The outrage and
folly of it struck him first and then the irony. Here was Dick, who
flaunted his right t