a, Charlotte
pausing a moment to regard them with her all-enveloping lavishment of
kindliness. Were they satisfied? Could she bring something more?

"The trouble with you, Dick," said Raven, after his third slice of
toast, buttered, he approvingly noted, to the last degree of drippiness,
"is poverty of invention. You repeat your climax. Now, this sending for
Milly: it's precisely what you did before. That's a mistake the actors
make: repeated farewells."

Dick made no answer. He, too, ate toast prodigiously.

"Now," said Raven, when they had finished, "do I understand you mean to
put your mother wise about what I told you last night? Yes or no?"

"I shall do----" said Dick, and at his pause Raven interrupted him.

"No, you won't," said he. "You won't do what you think best. Take it
from me, you won't. What I told you wasn't my secret. It's poor Tira's.
If you give her away to your mother--good God! think of it, Milly, with
her expensive modern theories and her psychiatry--got it right, that
time!--muddling up things for a woman like her! Where was I? Well,
simply, if you play a dirty trick like that on me, I'll pack you off,
you and your mother both. I don't like to remind you but, after all, old
man, the place is mine."

The blood came into Dick's face. He felt misjudged in his affection and
abused.

"You can't see," he said. "I don't believe it's because you can't. You
won't. It isn't Nan alone. It's you. You're not fit. You're no more fit
than you were when Mum was here before. And you can pack me off, but, by
thunder! I won't go."

"Very well," said Raven, with a happy inspiration. "You needn't. I'll go
myself. And I'll take Nan with me." A picture of Nan and her own vision
of happy isles came up before him, and he concluded: "Yes, by George!
I'll take Nan. And we'll sail for the Malay Peninsula, or an
undiscovered island, and wear Mother Hubbards and live on breadfruit,
and you and your precious conventions can go to pot."

So, having soothed himself by his own intemperance, he got up, found his
pipe and a foolish novel he made a point of reading once a year--it
would hardly do to tell what it was, lest the reader of this true story
fail to sympathize with his literary views and so with all his
views--and sat down to await his guests in a serviceable state of good
humor. He had brought Dick to what Charlotte would call "a realizing
sense." He could afford a bit of tolerance. Dick got up and flung out of