ly devoted to Miss Anne Hamilton,
whose conventional perfections evidently held within their limit Uncle
Jack's highest ideals. Uncle Jack had shown a neat talent with his pen.
He had grown middle-aged at an imperceptible and blameless pace, and now
he was raging about like a sort of cave man with nothing less than the
universe to bound his wild leaps and curvetings.

"But you know, Jack," he remonstrated feebly, "there isn't anything new
in saying the nation's going to the dogs. The Britishers say it, we say
it----"

"I don't say it," Raven asserted. "We're not going to the dogs. We've
gone. We're there. We're the dogs ourselves, and nothing worse could
happen to a criminal--from Mars, for example--than to be sent to us. We
ought to be the convict colony of the universe."

"Don't," said Dick, with an affectionate sweetness as exasperating as it
was moving. "It only excites you. Come on out and have a tramp. We could
motor out to----"

"O Lord!" groaned Raven. "Why don't you beguile me up to the
Psychopathic?"

Then he was, for the first time, aghast at what he had set going. Dick
was looking at him again with that suffused glance of an affection too
great to mind disclosing itself in all its pathetic abnegation.

"I couldn't say it myself," he began brokenly. "But you've said it; you
see yourself. If you would----"

There he stopped and Raven sat staring at him. He felt as if the words
had got inside his body and were somehow draining his heart. When he
spoke, his voice sounded hoarse in his own ears.

"Dick, old man," he said, "I'm not--that."

"No! no!" Dick hastened to assure him, and somehow his hand had found
Raven's and gripped it. "Only--O good God!" he ended, and got out of his
chair and turned his back.

Raven, too, rose.

"Dick," said he quietly, "you go home now. And don't you speak about
this to anybody, not to Nan even. You understand."

Dick nodded, still with his back turned, and got out of the room, and
Raven thought he must have caught at his hat in the hall, and made one
stride for the door. The door banged and Raven was alone.

VI

The next day Nan telephoned Raven that she was taking train for New York
for perhaps a week's stay with the Seaburys. These were her nearest
relatives, cousins at a remove Raven never really untangled, and of late
they had been spending persuasive energy in trying to induce her to live
with them. Since she had come home from France and Aunt Anne h