der
again before she left. He could see her stepping softly about, with her
deft, ordered movements, making it comely for him to find. She had left
pictures of herself on the air, sad pictures, most of them, telling the
tale of her terror and foreboding, but others of them quite different.
There were moments he remembered when, in pauses of her talk with him,
she glanced at the child, and still others when she sat immobile, her
hands clasped on her knee, her gaze on the fire. Henceforth the hut
would be full of her presence, hers and Old Crow's. And, unlike as they
were, they seemed to harmonize. Both were pitiful and yet austere in
their sincerity; and for both life had been a coil of tangled meanings.
He stayed there until nearly dark, and his musings waxed arid and dull
with the growing chill of the room. For he would not light the fire. It
had to be left in readiness.

When he went down he found Dick uneasily tramping the veranda.

"Charlotte wants us to have a cup of tea," said Dick. "She said supper's
put off till they come."

"They?" inquired Raven. "Who's they?"

"It's no use, Jack," Dick broke forth. "I might as well tell you. I
s'pose if I didn't you'd kick up some kind of a row later. I telephoned
Mum."

"You don't mean," said Raven, in a voice of what used to be called
"ominous calm," before we shook off the old catch-words and got
indirections of our own, "you don't mean you've sent for her!"

"It's no use," said Dick again, though with a changed implication, "you
might as well take things as they are. Nan can't come up here slumming
without an older woman. It isn't the thing. It simply isn't done."

Raven, through the window, saw Charlotte hovering in the library with
the tea tray. He watched her absently, as if his mind were entirely with
her. Yet really it was on the queerness of things as they are in the
uniform jacket of propriety and the same things when circumstance
thrusts the human creature out of his enveloping customs and sends him
into battle. He thought of Dick's philosophy of the printed word. He
thought of Nan's desperate life of daily emergency in France. Yet they
were all, he whimsically concluded, being squared to Aunt Anne's
rigidity of line. But why hers? Why not Old Crow's? Old Crow would have
had him rescue Tira, even through difficult ways. He opened the door.

"Come on in," he said. "Charlotte's buttered the toast."

Dick followed him, and they sat down to their abundant te