s of the War? Milly, as she said that night when she came to him
in her stark sincerity while Dick lay unconscious, had given him up
once. She had given him to the War, and done the act with the high
decorum suited to it. And the country had returned him to her. But now,
grotesque, bizarre beyond words, she had to surrender him to a fool
"shooting pa'tridges." For facing a travesty like that, she had no
decorum left.

Dick, too, was the victim of abnormal conditions. He had been summoned
to the great act of sacrifice to save the world, and the call had
challenged him to after judgments he was not ripe enough to meet. It had
beguiled him into a natural sophistry. For had not the world, in its
need, called mightily on the sheer strength and endurance of youth to
slay the dragon of brute strength in her enemies? Youth had done it.
Therefore there was no dragon, whether of the mind or soul, it could not
also slay. His fellows told him so, and because they were his fellows
and spoke the tongue he understood, he believed it with a simple honesty
that was Dick.

As to Nan, she seemed to Raven the one sane thing in a bewildered world;
and for himself: "I'm blest if I believe I'm so dotty, after all," he
mused. "What do you think about it?" And this last he addressed, not to
himself, but to the ever-present intelligence of Old Crow. He kept
testing things by what Old Crow would think. He spoke of him often, as
of a mind active in the universe, but only to Nan. And one night, late
enough in the spring for the sound of running water and a bitterness of
buds in the air, he said it to her when she came down the path to him
where he stood listening to the stillness broken by the ticking of the
season's clock--steady, familiar sounds, that told him winter had broken
and the heart of things was beating on to leaf and bloom. He had, if he
was not actually waiting for her, hoped she would come out, and now he
saw her coming, saw her step back into the hall for a scarf and appear
again, holding it about her shoulders. At last, firm as she was in
spirit, she had changed. She was thinner, with more than the graceful
meagerness of youth, and her eyes looked pathetically large from her
pale face. She had seen Dick go slipping down the slope, and now that
beneficent reactions were drawing him slowly back again, she was feeling
the waste of her own bodily fortitude.

"Where shall we go?" she asked him. "Been to the hut lately?"

No, Raven t