ed up from the station, and its urgency made him
horribly anxious. He had been especially aware of Nan all day. Little
threads of feeling between them had been thrilling to messages he
couldn't quite get, as if they were whispers purposely mysterious, to
scare a man. He was on edge with them. They quickened the apprehension
the message brought upon him overwhelmingly. She never would have
summoned him like that if she hadn't needed him, not a word by
telephone, but his actual presence. He had Jerry take him back again to
the station, and in the late afternoon he walked in on Nan waiting for
him in one of the rooms Anne Hamilton had kept faithful to the
traditions of bygone Hamiltons, but that now knew her no more. It was
Nan the room knew, Nan in her dull blue dress against the background of
pink roses she made for herself and the room, Nan white with the pallor
of extreme emotion, bright anxiety in her eyes and a tremor about her
mouth. She went to him at once, not as the schoolgirl had run, the last
time she offered her child lips to him, but as if the moment were a
strange moment, a dazzling peak of a moment to be approached--how should
she know the way to her heart's desire?

"What is it, dear?" asked Raven, not putting her off, as he had the
schoolgirl, but only unspeakably thankful for the bare fact of having
found her safe. "What's happened?"

"I had to tell you straight off," said Nan, "or I couldn't do it at all.
He sent me your letter--Dick. The one about me."

Raven was conscious of thinking clearly of two things at once. He was,
in the first place, aware of the live atoms which were the letter,
arranging themselves in his mind, telling him what they had told Nan. He
was also absently aware that Nan's face was so near his eyes it was
nothing but a blur of white, and that when he bent to it, the white ran,
in a rush, into a blur of pink.

"So Dick sent it to you," he said. "Well, God bless him for it. Kiss me,
my Nan."

* * * * *

By Alice Brown

The Prisoner
My Love and I
One Act Plays
The Black Drop
Vanishing Points
Robin Hood's Barn
Children of Earth
Homespun and Gold
The Flying Teuton
The Road To Castaly
Louise Imogen Guiney
Bromley Neighborhood
The Secret of the Clan
The Wind Between the Worlds
P/

End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Old Crow, by Alice Brown

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