all round and owlish, and they thickened up in middle life. If he could
have shared Uncle Jack's lean aquilinity, people would have looked at
him twice, as they did at Uncle Jack, which in itself would be a bore,
except that Nan also might look. Aware of these things and hiding them
in his soul, he held himself tight, shut his mouth close, and challenged
you with a spectacled eye, pinning you down as if to say: "I am born in
every particular as I didn't want to be, but take notice that I'll have
no light recognition of the hateful trick they did me. I am in training
for a husky fellow. I haven't let up on myself one instant since I found
out how horrible it was to be a good deal more of a fellow than I shall
ever look. I never shall let up. And don't you let me catch you letting
up either, in the way you treat me."

Nan, to go back to the minute of their entrance, made a swift assault
upon Raven. In the old days when he was a youngish man and she a little
girl, a growing thing, elongating like Alice, she used to hurl herself
into his arms and insist on staying there. Her aunt, Miss Anne Hamilton,
who had brought her up from babyhood, was always detaching her from
Raven; but Nan clung as persistently. Raven would look at Miss Anne,
over the girl's rumpled silk poll, with whimsically imploring eyes. Why
couldn't Nan be allowed to break upon him like a salty, fragrant wave of
the sea, he seemed to ask Miss Anne, bringing all sorts of floating
richness, the outcrop of her fancies and affections? Aunt Anne would
return the glance with her sweet, immovable deprecation and go on
detaching, while Nan, with an equal obstinacy--though hers was
protesting, vocable, sometimes shrill to the point of anguish--stuck to
her self-assumed rights. It was Raven himself who involuntarily stepped
over to Aunt Anne's side and finished the detaching process. When Nan
came back after her first term at the seminary Aunt Anne preferred to
college, and was running to him with her challenge of welcome, he was
taken aback by the nymph-like grace and beauty of her, the poise of the
small head with its braided crown--the girls at the seminary told her
she might have been a Victorian by the way she wore her hair--and he
instinctively caught her arms, about to enwreath his neck, held her
still and looked at her. She could not know what vision, overwhelming in
its suddenness, she brought before him, of childhood gone and maidenhood
come and the sacredne