ht, interpreting to him
daily the soul of France. He went over the first part of the letter with
them, article by article, point by point, very proud, under his
composure, of their uniform agreement with the admirable Monsieur Raven.
And after their business session was concluded and the two Frenchmen had
gone, Dick addressed himself to the last part of the letter, given in
these pages. He bent himself to it with the concentration that turns a
young face, even though but for the moment, into a prophetic hint of its
far-off middle age. If he had kept enough of his shy self-consciousness
to glance at himself in the glass, he would have been able to smile at
the old fear of what the years might do to him. No heaviness there, such
as he remembered in his father's face: only trouble, pain, and their
mysteriously refining tracery. But the heaviness was in his heart. He
had to understand the letter absolutely, not only what it said but all
it implied. If it actually meant what he believed it to mean at first
reading, it drew a heavy line across his own life. Nan had drawn the
line before, but this broadened it, reenforced it with a band of black
absolutely impossible to cross. And it did mean it, and, having seen
that, without a possibility of doubt, he enclosed the letter in an
envelope, addressed it to Nan, and leaned back in his chair, never, he
believed, to think it over again, never so long as he and Nan lived.
There was no residuum of sentiment in his mind as there was in Raven's
that, after Nan had finished with this life, according to her own ideas,
there might be hope of another Nan bloomed out of this one somewhere
else and another Dick, risen out of his ashes, to try his luck again.
No, the line across the page was the line across their lives, and, said
Dick: "That's that." But he caught his breath, as he said it, and was
glad there was no one by to hear. Anybody who heard would have said it
was a sob. He was, he concluded, rather fagged with the day. These
confounded Frenchmen, with their wits you couldn't keep up with, they
took it out of you.

This was why Raven, in Wake Hill, on the morning the letter came to Nan
in Boston, got a telegram from her, saying: "Come back." He had gone
there to stay over a night, after a few hours' visit with Tenney, who
was eagerly glad to see him, and again begging to be confirmed in his
condition of spiritual whiteness. Raven had just got to his house when
the message was telephon