ill,
perhaps, by compassion. And then his mother had died and he knew he
could have done no more for her than he had done, and while he was
turning round to look about him--and ah! in that lean year came Anne's
horrible accusation that he did not love her!--the War broke out, and he
felt himself shocked into action. The very atoms of his body seemed to
fall asunder and rearrange themselves and, as soon as he could decently
get away, without throwing the bewilderment of the business on Anne, he
had gone, and he had never seen her again.

He had written to her faithfully, and with the compassion that was
either natally or by the habit of life a part of him, but he had not
obeyed her. For she begged him, almost, at intervals, commanded him, to
return to work with her for the peace of mankind. At first he tried to
explain himself and assuage her grief over what she called his desertion
of their common ideals. He answered the arguments in the letters that
had become a misery to him to receive as his had become an inexpressible
burden to write. Finally, with a wrench to himself, he ceased, and, with
infinite pains, compiled data that might interest without offending her.
The letters continued, but as soon as he found she was sending him
abstractions valueless because they had no roots in the living issues of
things, he had to stop. That, not her death, had been their lasting
farewell.

What, in the name of all that was mysterious, he reflected, had made
Anne--and so early--assume the burden of an unasked allegiance to him?
His family and hers had been next-door neighbors at Wake Hill, but on no
equality of worldly footing. The Hamiltons, thriving on wool, had been
able to buy for themselves all the picturesque luxuries of civilized
life. Their women toiled not. Their delicate air was the product of
tuition in dainty ways. Their men had acquired the unconscious pose of
dominance, of knowing what was their due and expecting to get it without
argument. Sometimes up there at Wake Hill they did receive a
disconcerting knock or two from some "embattled farmer" whom they called
"my man," and who didn't like the sound of it. But the answering rebuff
never penetrated the fine mail of their acquired arrogance. It meant,
they smilingly said, "New England," and tolerantly passed it by. Raven's
people were of a different stripe, "brainy," he thought with an unspoken
pride of his own, yet deficient in a certain practical quality of taking