of the hour, was unstudied.
Her hair, ordinarily waved, even in the country, by the intelligence of
her capable fingers, was twisted in a knot on the back of her head.
Raven, so effective had been the success of her ameliorating devices,
thought Milly's hair conspicuously pretty. But now there was a little
button of it only, as if she had prepared for exacting service where one
displaced lock might undo her. A blue silk negligee was wrapped about
her, with a furled effect of tightening to the blast, and her face was
set in a mask of grief that was not grief alone, but terror. She came in
and sat down in one of the chairs by the hearth, not relaxing in the
act, but as if she could no longer stand.

"John!" she said, in a broken interrogation. "John!"

He got up and elaborately tended the fire, laying the sticks together
with an extreme care, and thinking, as he did it, by one of those idle
divagations of the mind, like a grace note on the full chord of action,
that a failing fire had helped a man out of more than one hole in this
disturbing life. It gave your strung nerves and rasped endurance a
minute's salutary pause. He put down the tongs and returned to his
chair.

"Buck up, Milly," said he. "Everything's being done. Now it'll be up to
Dick."

But he realized, as if it were another trial setting upon him at the
moment when he had borne enough, that his eyes were suddenly hot. This
was not for Milly, not for himself. Again, for some obscure reason, he
saw Dick's eyes, softened, childlike, as he had recalled them without
their glasses. Through these past weeks of strain, he had been irritated
with the boy, he had jeered at him for the extravagances of his gusty
youth. Why, the boy was only a boy, after all! But Milly, leaning
forward to the fire, her trembling hands over the blaze, was talking
with amazing intensity, but still quietly, not to disturb the stillness
of the expectant house. For the house, suddenly changed, seemed itself
to be waiting, as houses do in time of trouble. Was it for Dick to die
or to take on life again? Houses are seldom kind at such times, even in
their outward tranquillity. They are sinister.

And when Milly began to speak, Raven found he had to deal with a woman
surprisingly different from the one who had striven to heal him through
her borrowed aphorisms.

"To think," she began, "to think he should escape, after being over
there--over there, John, in blood and dirt and death--and c