ou're my keeper. Out with it, boy?
How do you see it? Come!"

Dick, from a patent embarrassment, was staring down at the hearth, and
now he looked quickly up in a frankness truly engaging.

"Jack," he said, "you needn't think you're going to be left here alone,
to work things out by yourself. There's no danger of mother. I told her
to keep off. She only irritates you. But she hasn't gone back home.
She's right there in Boston, waiting to come."

Raven got up and walked back and forth through the room. Then he
returned to his chair.

"Dick," he said conversationally, "if you were as young in years as you
are in your mind, I'd mellow you."

Dick generously ignored this. He had the impeccable good nature of the
sane set in authority over the sick.

"What I think, is," he said, with a soothing intonation Raven
despairingly recognized as the note of strength pitting itself against
weakness, "we can work it out together, you and I. We can do it better
than anybody else. I suppose if I went back you'd send for Nan. But that
won't do, Jack. You'll see it for yourself, when you're all right again.
Now what I mean about Old Crow is, that his complexes are like yours--or
rather yours are like his. Don't you see what an influence he's had on
you? More than Miss Anne even."

"Hold up," said Raven. "I'm being mighty patient with you, but certain
things, you know, you don't say."

"You used to go up there and see him," said Dick, willingly
relinquishing Miss Anne. There were times when, as he remembered from
boyhood, old Jack was dangerous. "Some of the things about him shocked
you. Some appealed to you. Pity, too: you must have pitied him
tremendously. You probably knew about his craze over this girl he
mentions here. You may have heard things about her, just as he did.
Jack, I can see--the whole thing has come to me in the last ten
minutes--Old Crow has been the big influence in your life. Everything
else has come from that. And then the war knocked you out and you got
_cafard_ and the whole blasted business blew up and came to the surface
and--there you are."

"Yes," said Raven, "here we are."

He leaned back in his chair and laughed until he could have cried. Never
had he found anything funnier than the boy's honest face and his honest
voice pouring forth undigested scraps from haphazard gleanings.

"Dick," he said, "you're a dear fellow. But you're an awful ass. The
trouble is with you, old man, you've no imaginatio