lming, matter of the
mounting blood, the growing year. For him it would be the ashes of
forgotten fire, the strange alembic mixed of bitter with the sweet. In
that moment he faced an acknowledged regret that he had not lived the
normal life of marriage at the start, the quieting of foolish fevers,
the witness of children. We are not, he reflected, quite solvent unless
we pay tribute before we go. He mused off into the vista of life as it
accomplishes itself not in great triumphal sweeps, but fitful music
hushed at intervals by the crash of brutal mischance, and only, at the
end, a solution of broken chords. Meantime Dick watched him, and Raven
at last, feeling the boy's eyes on him, came awake with a start.

"Yes, Dick," he answered gently, "of course you love her. And it ought
to do you good. It's a big thing to love Nan."

"Very well then," said Dick, his voice trembling a little in answer to
that gentler tone, "you let her alone, can't you? Nan's a different girl
when she's with you. It's no use denying it. You do hypnotize her."

"Dick," said Raven, "that's a beastly thing to say. If you mean it to be
as offensive as it sounds, you ought to be booted for it."

"Oh," said Dick, with a simple certainty in what he knew, "I don't blame
you as I should any other fellow that wasn't going through what you are.
That would be a simple matter to deal with: a chap that knew what he was
doing. You don't, old man. You may not know it, but you don't."

"For the land's sake!" said Raven, echoing Charlotte, "And what, again
for the land's sake, am I going through?"

"You know," said Dick uneasily because he did hope to avoid putting it
into words. "_Cafard._"

Raven had one of his moments of silence, getting hold of himself, taking
the matter in, with its forgotten enormity.

"So," he said, "you've adopted your mother's word for it. I hadn't
realized that."

"Oh, Mum's no such fool," said Dick. "She may be an aggravation and a
curse--I'll own that--but she's up to date. Why, Jack, anybody that ever
knew you'd know you're not yourself."

"No," thought Raven, "few of us are ourselves. We've been through the
War, my son. So have you; but you didn't have such a brittle old world
inside you to try to put together again after it was smashed. Your inner
world was in the making. Whatever you might feel in its collision with
the runaway planet of the mad human mind, it could right itself; its
atoms might cohere."

"You needn't