mind even to weigh the significance of toast and eggs, was
staring at him. He was cheated by a poverty of words when he most needed
them, and could only repeat:

"I hadn't the least idea. I tell you it never occurred to me. I don't
believe it did to Nan, either."

"What?" asked Raven. "What is it that didn't occur to you?"

"I did think of it when you first spoke of going to France, you know,"
said Dick, in a justification of himself that seemed more for his own
ease than Raven's. "I didn't believe you could pull it off, a man of
your years. You took it so easy! You never turned a hair. But I might
have known you'd have to pay for it afterward."

"What is it I've taken so admirably?" asked Raven. "What is it I've got
to pay for?"

"Why," said Dick, "your slogging over there--a man of your age----"

"Well," said Raven curtly, cracking his voice at him in a way Dick had
never had to take from him, "how is it I'm paying? What's the matter
with me?"

"Why," said Dick, in a perfect innocence of any offense in it, "don't
you know? You've seen enough of it. I should think you'd be the first to
know."

Raven simply looked at him. Dick had a feeling that his uncle was about
to roar out something, and braced himself for the unbelievable event.
However, it would not surprise him. That, he knew, was a part of it. But
Raven was putting his question again, smoothly and tolerantly, as if to
assure him there was time enough to make a well considered reply:

"Just what, in your opinion, is the matter with me?"

"Why," said Dick, that innocent gaze still upon him, "shell shock."

Raven jumped. Every nerve in him seemed to give a little twitch of pure
surprise with every other.

"O Lord!" said he. "Who could ever have expected that? It's worse than I
thought."

"Why, it's no disgrace," Dick assured him eagerly. "Think how many
fellows have had it. They haven't got over it. They're having it now.
The only thing to do is to recognize it and put yourself under
treatment."

"That'll do," said Raven, with a determined calm. "Your diagnosis has
gone far enough. And now I shall have to ask you to do two things for
me."

"Two!" Dick echoed, and Raven, though at the end of his patience, was
touched to see the suffused look of the boy's eyes. "You needn't cut it
down to two. Just you tell me----"

There, though he was poetically eloquent and diffuse in print, he
stopped and could literally say no more without an emotion he con