ng whether the boy was quivering
under his calm, "a case against the moderns?"

Dick answered promptly, though Raven could only wonder, after all, just
what he meant:

"It's a case against me." He went on, his eyes still on the melodious
orchard converts. It must have been a vagabond robin swaggering there,
really deriding nests, he found so much leisure to sing about them. "I
wanted to say I didn't get you that time when you told me you'd pretty
much done with the world. I though Mum was right: _cafard_, you
remember. But I've swung round into the same rut. It's a rotten system.
I'm done with it."

Raven looked at him in a sudden sharp misery of apprehension. First, Old
Crow, then he, then Dick, one generation following another.

"Don't you go that path, old man," he said. "You'll only lose your way
and have to come back."

"Come back?"

"Yes. Old Crow did. Remember the book. He challenged the whole business,
and then he swung round to adoring it all, the world and Whoever made
it. He didn't understand it a whit better, but he believed, he accepted,
he adored."

"What would you say?" Dick asked curiously, after a moment. "Just what
happened to him?"

"Why, I suppose," said Raven, "in the common phrase, he found God."

They were silent for a time and both of them tried desperately to think
of the vagabond robin. Raven, his mind released by this fascination of
dwelling on Dick apart from any responsibility of talking to him, found
it running here, there, back and forth, over these weeks of their stay
together. It halted, it ran on, it stopped again to consider, but always
it was of Dick and incidentally of himself who didn't matter so much,
but who had to be in it all. Were they at one in this epidemic of world
sickness? As the great explosive forces of destruction and decay seemed
to have released actual germs to attack the physical well-being of
races, had the terrible crashes of spiritual destinies unsettled the
very air of life, poisoned it, drugged it with madness and despair? Was
there a universal disease of the mind, following this wholesale
slaughter, which the human animal hadn't been able really to bear though
it had come to a lull in it, so that now it was, in sheer shrieking
panic, clutching at its various antidotes to keep on living? One
antidote was forgetfulness. They were forgetting the War, some thousands
of decent folk who clearly had meant to remember. A horrible antidote
that, but perhaps