the room, finding Raven, he told himself, in one of his extravagant
moods. Nine times out of ten the moods meant nothing. On the other hand,
in this present erratic state of a changed Raven, they might mean
anything. For himself, he was impatient, with the headlong rush of young
love. Nan was coming. She was on the way. Would she be the same, distant
with her cool kindliness, her old lovely self to Raven only, or might
she be changed into the Nan who kissed him that one moment of his need?
He snatched his hat and tore out of the house, and Raven, glancing up
from his novel, saw him striding down the path and thought approvingly
he was a wise young dog to walk off some of his headiness before Nan
came. As for him, he would doze a little over his foolish book, as
became a man along in years. That was what Charlotte would say, "along
in years." Was it so? What a devil of an expression, like all the rest
of them that were so much worse than the thing itself: "elderly,"
"middle-aged," what a grotesque vocabulary! And he surprised himself by
throwing his foolish book, with an accurate aim, at a space in the
shelves, where it lodged and hung miserably, and getting up and tearing
down the walk at a pace emulating Dick's, but in the opposite direction:
the result of these athletic measures being that when Amelia and Nan
drove up with Jerry, the station master's pung following with two small
trunks that seemed to wink at Raven, with an implication of their
competitive resolve to stay, two correctly clad gentlemen were waiting
on the veranda in a state of high decorum. As to the decorum, it didn't
last, so far as Raven was concerned. Messages of a mutual understanding
passed between his eyes and Nan's. He burst into sudden laughter, but
Nan, more sagely alive to the dangers of the occasion, kept her gravity.

"Well," said Amelia, as Raven, still laughing, solicitously lifted her
out, "you seem to be in a very happy frame of mind. I'm glad you _can_
laugh."

XXXIV

Thereafter they all behaved as if they had separated yesterday and
nothing was more natural than to find themselves together again. Amelia,
with bitterness in her heart, accepted the room she again longed to
repudiate, and Nan, with a lifted eyebrow at Raven, as if wondering
whether she'd really better be as daring as he indicated, followed
Charlotte up the stairs. At supper they talked decorously of the state
of the nation, which Raven frankly conceived of as