his--and believed now, as he
thought it over, that he met Milly and Nan, who had seen their approach,
running to meet him, and that he said something about accident and, as
if it were an echo of Tenney, a fool shooting partridges. Milly, shocked
out of her neat composure, gave a cry, but Nan turned on her, bade her
be quiet, and called Charlotte to the bedroom to get it ready. It was
Milly's room, but the most accessible place. Raven telephoned for the
doctor at the street and called a long-distance for a Boston surgeon of
repute, asking him to bring two nurses; and he and Nan rapidly dressed
the wound, with Dick still mercifully off in the refuge called
unconsciousness. Raven remembered that Milly, as she got in his way,
kept telling him she ought to have taken a course in first aid, and that
Dick was her son and if a mother didn't know, who did? But he fancied he
did not answer at all, and that he and Nan worked together, with quick
interrogative looks at each other here and there, a lifted eyebrow, a
confirming nod. And now the local doctor had arrived, had professed
himself glad his distinguished colleague had been summoned and approved
Raven's work. He was gone in answer to another urgent call, and the
surgeon had not come, could not come for hours. But Dick was conscious,
though either too weak or too wisely cautious to lift an eyelid, and Nan
was with him. That Raven had ordered, and told Milly she was to come to
the library after Jerry moved her things upstairs and she was settled
for the night.

Milly was badly shaken. She looked, her strained eyes and mouth
compressed, as if not only was she robbed of the desire of sleep, but
had sworn never, in her distrust of what life could do to her, to sleep
again. But she had not appeared, and as Raven sat there waiting for her,
Charlotte came down the stairs and glanced in, a comprehensive look at
the light, the fire, and at him, as if to assure him, whatever the need
in the sick room, she kept him also in mind. Raven signed to her and she
nodded. He had a question to ask. It had alternated in his mind with
queer little heart-beats of alarm about Dick: hemorrhage, shock,
hemorrhage--recurrent beats of prophetic disaster.

"Have you seen Tira?" he asked. "I told her to come here and stay till
we could get her off somewhere."

Then he remembered that, so wide-reaching did Charlotte always seem to
him in her knowledge of the life about her, he had not explained why
Tira