didn't seem to be surviving,
in any operative form.

"Writing?" he suggested. "Oxford--and poetry?"

Dick shook his head.

"Well," said Raven, "if it's France then, maybe I'll go with you."

Dick smiled slightly. Did his lip tremble?

"No," he said, at once, as if he'd been waiting for it, "you stay here
and look after Nan."

This gave Raven the slightest opening.

"That's the devil of it," he said, "your leaving Nan."

"Yes," said Dick quietly, his eyes on an orchard tree where an unseen
robin sang, "I'm leaving her."

"She's been devoted to you," Raven ventured.

"Quite so. I've been lying there and seeing----"

He paused and Raven prompted:

"Seeing what?"

Dick finished, with a deeper quiet:

"Seeing her look at you."

Raven, too, stared at the tree where the robin kept up the bright beauty
of his lay. He was conscious, not of any need to combat this finality of
Dick's, but of a sense, more poignant than he could support without
calling on his practiced endurance, of the pity of it, the "tears of
things." Here was youth, its first bitter draught in hand, not recoiling
from it, but taking it with the calmness of the older man who has fewer
years to taste it in. He could not ask the boy to consider, to make no
hasty judgment. Whatever lay behind the words, it was something of a
grave consequence. And Dick himself led the way out of the slough where
they were both caught.

"Curious things come to you," he said, "when you're laid by the heels
and can't do anything but think: I mean, as soon as you get the nerve to
think."

"Such as?"

"Well, poetry, for one thing. When I began to think--and I didn't want
it to be about Nan any more than I could help--I used to have a
temperature, you know--puzzled them, doctor, nurse, all of you. Nan,
that was! I knew it, though the rest of you hadn't the sense. Well, I
made my mind run away from it. I said I'd think about poetry, my long
poem. I'd lie there and say it over to myself, and see if the rest of it
wouldn't come." He laughed a little, though not bitterly. He was frankly
amused. "What do you think? I couldn't even remember the confounded
thing. But I could other things: the verse I despised. Wasn't that the
limit? Omar Khayyam! I lay there and remembered it by the yard."

"That's easy," said Raven. "Nothing like the first impressions. They
stick."

"Evidently," said Dick. "They did stick. And my stuff didn't."

"Is this," Raven ventured, not seei