t used to having it done. Maybe
it's a relief to him. I don't know."

"Does he still look like a lunatic at large?"

"More or less. His eyes are less like infuriated shoe buttons, but on
the whole he seems to have quieted a lot."

"You don't suppose," said Dick, "you've put the fear of God into him?"

"Not much. If anybody has, it was you when he saw you topple over and
knew he'd got the wrong man."

"He was laying for you, then," said Dick.

"Why, yes," said Raven. "Tira was there, telling me he'd set up a gun,
and she'd got to the point of letting Nan take her away, when he fired.
What the dickens were you up there for, anyhow?" he ended, not quite
able to deny himself reassurance.

"I'd heard he was out with a gun," said Dick briefly. "Charlotte told
me. And I gathered from your leaving word for Nan that the Tenney woman
was there--at the hut, you know."

"Don't say 'the Tenney woman,'" Raven suggested. "I can't say I feel
much like calling her by his name myself, but 'the Tenney woman' isn't
quite----"

"No," said Dick temperately. "All right, old man, I won't."

"Awfully sorry you got it instead of me," said Raven, apparently without
feeling. He had wanted to say this for a long time. "Wish it had been
the other way round."

"I don't, then," said Dick, gruffly in his turn. "It's been an
eye-opener, the whole business."

"What has?"

"This." He evidently meant his own hurt and the general viewpoint
induced by it. "I'm not going to stay round here, you know," he
continued, presenting this as a proposition he had got to state abruptly
or not at all.

"Why not?"

"I don't believe I could say," Dick temporized, in a way that suggested
he didn't mean to try. "There's Mum, you know. She's going to be at me
again to go in for my degree. Oh, yes, she will, soon as she thinks I
won't come unglued. Well, I don't want it. I simply don't. And I don't
want what she calls a profession: any old thing, you know, so long as
it's a profession. I couldn't go in for that either, Jack. If I do
anything, it's got to be on my own, absolutely on my own. Fact is, I'd
like to go back to France."

"Reconstruction?" Raven suggested, after a minute.

"Maybe. Not that I'm specially valuable. Only it would be something to
get my teeth into."

Was this, too, Raven wondered, an aftermath of the War? Had it shaken
the atoms of his young purpose too far astray for them ever to cohere
again? Dick had had one purpose. Even that