ld."

Nan thought she could add what had been in her mind, keeping time to
every step of the way home: "For now she loves you better than the
child." But it proved impossible to say that, and she went out of the
room, not looking at him, and only waiting to put away her hat and coat
in the hall. She went upstairs with the same unhurried step and shut the
door of her room behind her. She stood there near the door, as if she
were guarding it against even the thoughts of any human creature. They
must not get at her, those compassionate thoughts, not Charlotte's,
certainly not Raven's. For at that moment Nan found herself a little
absurd, as many a woman has who knows herself to be starving for a man's
love. She began to tremble, and remembered Tira shaking there by the
door that morning that seemed now years away. The tremor got hold of her
savagely and shook her. It might have been shaking her in its teeth.

"Nervous chill!" said Nan to herself, insisting on saying it aloud to
see if her teeth would actually chatter and finding they did. She had
seen plenty of such nervous whirlwinds among her boys and helped to
quiet them. "I'm an interesting specimen," chattered Nan. "Talk about
_cafard_!"

All that forenoon, Dick fretted about the house, waiting for her, hoping
she would go to walk, let him read to her--Dick had a persistent habit
of reading verse to you when he found you weren't likely to get into the
modern movement by yourself--but no Nan. At dinner, there she was,
rather talkative, in a way that took Amelia into the circle of intimacy,
and seemed to link up everybody with everybody else in a nice manner.
Nan had the deftest social sense, when she troubled herself to use it.
Aunt Anne would have been proud of her.

XXXVI

Then everything, so far as Raven and Nan were concerned, quieted to an
unbroken commonplace, and the four--for Amelia and Dick held to their
purpose of "standing by"--again settled down to country life, full of
the amenities and personal abnegations of a house party likely to be
continued. Charlotte was delighted, in her brooding way, and ascribed
the emotion to Jerry who, she said, "liked somethin' goin' on." Nan and
Dick had vaulted back to their past: the old terms of a boy and girl
intimacy in robust pursuits admitting much laughter and homespun talk.
They went snowshoeing over the hills, Raven, though Nan begged him to
come, electing to stay at home with Amelia, who would stand at