fly, omitting to confess what the woman looked to his
dazzled eyes. It was a drawing austerely black and white. Could he tell
anyone--anyone but Nan--how she had seemed to him there, the old, old
picture of motherhood, divine yet human? It was too much to risk. If he
did lay his mind bare about that moment which was his alone, and Dick
met it with his unimaginative astuteness, he could not trust himself to
be patient with the boy. He said little more than that he had given her
the freedom of the hut, and that he meant always to have it ready for
her. Then he came to this last night of all, when she had run away from
Tenney, not because he had been violent, but because he had "kept
still." That did take hold on Dick's imagination, the imagination he
seemed able to divorce from the realities of life and kept for the
printed page.

"By thunder!" he said. "Burned the crutch, did she? That's a story in
itself, a real story: Mary Wilkins, Robert Frost. That's great!"

"Sounds pretty big to me," said Raven quietly. "But it's not for print.
See you don't feel tempted to use it. Now, here we are with Tira up
against it. She's got to make a quick decision. And she's made it."

"Do you call her by her first name?" asked Dick, leaping the main issue
to frown over the one possibly significant of Raven's state of mind.

"Yes," said Raven steadily, "I rather think I call her by her first
name. I don't know whether I ever have 'to her head,' as Charlotte would
say, but I don't seem to feel like calling her by Tenney's name. Well,
Tira's decided. She's going to give her baby to Nan."

Dick's eyes enlarged to such an extent, his mouth opened so vacuously,
that Raven laughed out. Evidently Dick wasn't regarding the matter from
Tira's standpoint, or even Raven's now, but his own.

"Nan!" he echoed, when he could get his lips into action. "Where does
Nan come in?"

"Oh," said Raven, with a most matter-of-fact coolness, "Nan came in long
ago. I told her about it, and it seems she went to see Tira off her own
bat, and offered to take the baby."

"She sha'n't do it," proclaimed Dick. "I simply won't have it, that's
all."

"I fancy," said Raven, "Nan'll tell you you've got nothing whatever to
do with it. And really, Dick, you never'll get Nan by bullying her.
Don't you know you won't?"

Dick, having a perfectly good chance, turned the tables on him neatly.

"That'll do," said he, remembering how Raven had shut him up when he
dragge