IV

Raven sat down at the table and began his letter. He was wrestling with

it at once, to give himself no time to argue over the point of its being

no ordinary letter such as he had been accustomed to write to Dick. He

began with the succinct statement of what he meant to do. He had made

all his arrangements for getting out of the business. They could be

concluded in short order. As to the business itself, he had no complaint

to make. The old man--he permitted himself this indulgence as he never

could have in Anne's lifetime, as touching her father--the old man had

been square all through. He was as good as they make 'em. But there was

nothing for him, Raven, in the concern except its cumulative capacity

for making money. He'd no traditional pride in it, as the old man had.

He'd worked for all he was worth, to squeeze every drop he could out of

it so that his mother--"your grandmother, you know, Dick"--might have

every last luxury she wanted. Well, she'd had 'em, though one of the

ironical things about it was that she didn't want so very many, and he

needn't have worked so hard or so long. However, that's neither here nor

there. What's done is done. The War's done--they say--and the thing that

would please Raven best would be----Here he brought up with a full stop.

He was running into dangerous revelations, going back to a previous

state of mind, one he had begun cherishing as soon as his mother died,

and even caressed, with a sort of denied passion, when Anne also died,

and he felt so shamefacedly free. All his life he had wanted to wander,

to explore, to bruise himself against the earth and pick himself up and

go on and get bruised again. He loved the earth, he wanted her, in her

magnificence and cruelty, wanted to write about her, and make the

portrait of her for stay-at-homes who weren't adventurous and were

content with reading about her in the blank moments after the office

grind. Yet he was a stay-at-home himself. Why? in God's name why?

He asked himself the question, as he sat with lifted pen, almost the

words dropping off it, to tell Dick the things it would be simply

disconcerting to know. Raven saw, with a sad clearness, why he hadn't

written the books he wanted to about the earth. They would have been

rough books, full of rock and clay and the tumbling of rivers and

thunder grumbling in the clouds. If he had been really afraid of Anne

and her ordered ambitions for him, he could have printed them under an

assumed name. She need never have known at all. They wouldn't have been

the books he could have written if he had been foot-loose and gone

blundering along in strange trails over the earth, but they might have

held something of the sort his inner man wanted to fashion. And if the

secret of them had been kept, they needn't have interfered with his smug

little folk stories Anne and her women's clubs prized so much. Had he

been actually afraid of Anne? Was he one of the men who are shamefully

under the feminine finger, subject to mother, subject to wife, without

the nerve--scarcely the wish, indeed--to break away? He was not afraid

of his mother, or, if he had been, it was the fear of hurting her who

had been so hurt already. Ever since he could remember, he saw himself,

even as a little boy, trying to get her away from his father who had a

positive cast of mind, a perfect certainty of being right and a

confirmed belief that robust measures always were the thing. If you did

wrong, you were to be punished, promptly and effectually. If you were

afraid of the dark, and came downstairs in your nightgown upon the

family sitting by the lamp, you were whaled for it, to teach you there

was something worse than bed even in the dark. If you said your head

ached and you couldn't eat bacon and greens, which father elected to

consider a normal dish, you were made to eat a lot with no matter what

dire result, because there wasn't a physical ill which couldn't be

mended by treating it robustly. He was God. He knew. And he was

perfectly well and had never once for half a minute entered into those

disordered cells of bodily ill where the atom cries to its Creator in an

anguish of bewilderment and pain. And when his body met the fate

appointed for its destruction, as all bodies must, and he was brought

home broken after the runaway that made him a thing almost too terrible

to look upon, except by eyes so full of compassion that they love the

more, Raven, then a very little John, found himself wondering how it

seemed to father now. Even runaways, father had appeared to think, could

always be governed, if you kept your head.

They never knew what he thought. He died quickly, under opiates, and

John believed his mother was so thankful for the merciful haste of it

that she could not, until long after, recall herself to mourn. And she

did honestly mourn. The little John was glad of that. So ill and tired

had she been for years and yet so bound upon the rack of her husband's

Spartan theories for her, that John thought he could not have borne it

if she had not adored her righteous tormentor, if she had had to look on

him as her master, not her lord by love. It seemed to him he was always

mourning over his mother, in those days, always lying awake and

wondering if she were awake, too, always trying to save her from some

task too heavy for her and too heavy for him also, so that, if she were

to be saved, it had to be by stratagem. But stratagem was difficult in

that house, because his older sister, who became Dick's mother, was of

her father's temperament, always perfectly well and also an inferior god

who knew at every point what to do, and she had not merely imbibed

father's certainty that the only thing mother needed was to take a

brace: she had it by nature. And when, father being gone to heaven--and

John, young John now, not little any more, made no doubt he had gone, it

pleased mother so to say it and be obligingly agreed with--Amelia, his

sister, took her departure, on the night of her marriage with a very

prosperous Mr. Powell, for the middle west, John Raven, then beginning

his apprenticeship to wool, danced a fantastic fling in the sitting-room

where the wedding gifts still lay displayed and whooped with emotion at

last let loose. His mother, in the gray silk and commendable lace Amelia

had selected and he had paid for, did smile unwillingly, but she spoke

to him in the reproving tone which was the limit of severity his boyhood

had known from her and which he had learned, in those earliest days,

meant nothing at all:

"I'd be ashamed! Any one would think you were glad your sister had

gone!"

John did not say he was glad. He knew too much to stir up loyal

reactions in mother's conscience. He simply wove a dance of intricate

mazes about her, as she sat in her chair, and his inner mind was one

paean of thanksgiving to God, not the spurious gods who had been his

father and sister, but the mysterious Deity who had, for obscure

purposes, called them into being, because now John had at last full

swing and could let mother out of bondage. What difference did it make

that he wasn't trekking through darkest Africa or being hunted by the

jungle in India, so long as mother was out of bondage? He even took his

allegiance to Anne rather lightly, those first years, he was so

absent-minded about everything but hypnotising mother into thinking she

was going to be very happy and live a long time doing it. And that was

the part of his life when there seemed to be a great deal of it, and if

he didn't have a thing now there would be plenty of chances to snatch at

it later. He had simply been eaten up, the energy of him, the will,

perhaps, by compassion. And then his mother had died and he knew he

could have done no more for her than he had done, and while he was

turning round to look about him--and ah! in that lean year came Anne's

horrible accusation that he did not love her!--the War broke out, and he

felt himself shocked into action. The very atoms of his body seemed to

fall asunder and rearrange themselves and, as soon as he could decently

get away, without throwing the bewilderment of the business on Anne, he

had gone, and he had never seen her again.

He had written to her faithfully, and with the compassion that was

either natally or by the habit of life a part of him, but he had not

obeyed her. For she begged him, almost, at intervals, commanded him, to

return to work with her for the peace of mankind. At first he tried to

explain himself and assuage her grief over what she called his desertion

of their common ideals. He answered the arguments in the letters that

had become a misery to him to receive as his had become an inexpressible

burden to write. Finally, with a wrench to himself, he ceased, and, with

infinite pains, compiled data that might interest without offending her.

The letters continued, but as soon as he found she was sending him

abstractions valueless because they had no roots in the living issues of

things, he had to stop. That, not her death, had been their lasting

farewell.

What, in the name of all that was mysterious, he reflected, had made

Anne--and so early--assume the burden of an unasked allegiance to him?

His family and hers had been next-door neighbors at Wake Hill, but on no

equality of worldly footing. The Hamiltons, thriving on wool, had been

able to buy for themselves all the picturesque luxuries of civilized

life. Their women toiled not. Their delicate air was the product of

tuition in dainty ways. Their men had acquired the unconscious pose of

dominance, of knowing what was their due and expecting to get it without

argument. Sometimes up there at Wake Hill they did receive a

disconcerting knock or two from some "embattled farmer" whom they called

"my man," and who didn't like the sound of it. But the answering rebuff

never penetrated the fine mail of their acquired arrogance. It meant,

they smilingly said, "New England," and tolerantly passed it by. Raven's

people were of a different stripe, "brainy," he thought with an unspoken

pride of his own, yet deficient in a certain practical quality of taking

the world "but as the world," and consequently always poor. Their ways

were rougher ways. Their women had to work to trim the edges of their

plainer surroundings with the alleviating prettinesses the Hamiltons

cast aside with every changing style. And Anne, coming home from Europe

one summer, where she had not only seen wonder and beauty, already

familiar to her--for she was a young lady then--and where he knew she

had met men and women whose names were trumpet calls in his

ears--singled him out, in his shyness and obscurity, and offered him the

key to the fulfilment of his dreams. Education, travel, the life of

books--all were in her hand, the potential fruit of her father's doting

affection for her, and all were to be his. What could have inspired her

with so wholesale and fantastic a philanthropy? He could never

adequately guess, and he was no nearer doing it now than in the old

bewildering days when the Hesperidean apples were dropping over him and

he was, from some shy instinct, dodging to avoid them. And the reason he

had never guessed and never could guess was that he left out of all the

data at his hand the one first moving factor: that he was a beautiful

youth and Anne had imperiously loved him and had never ceased to love.

As he sat there, the pen lifted, his mind going back over the things

that had led him away from adventure into wool, and were now leading him

as far from wool as might be, he was tempted. What if, in spite of Nan,

he should risk it and tell Dick, once for all, why he was going away,

make it clear so there should be no after-persuasions, no clutter of

half understanding? He was tired of thinking about his life as a life.

The temptation to such morose musing had come upon him in the last six

months, and once yielded to, he felt the egotistical disease of it

through his very blood and bones. If he were Catholic, he could confess

and get rid of it. He was not Catholic, only pagan, the natural man. The

Church had a wisdom of her own. All her rites and ceremonies found their

root in something salutary for the human mind. Confession was salutary.

You might not be absolved, but if you were pagan you could believe that

the very act of it absolved you. Nan said Dick never would understand.

So much the better. Let him carry off the burden of it. If he

understood, he'd see the extreme sacredness of a confidence entrusted to

him. If he didn't, he'd hide it as a thing you'd better say as little

about as possible. So he tucked his first letter into its envelope and

began to write again, with no date and no direct address, but from a

sense that it was going to be an enormously comforting thing to do.

V

"I think I'll tell you the real reason why I'm going to Wake Hill. I've

told you I'm going, but just as my nerves move the muscles that move my

legs to go, so my will moves my nerves and the me that is inside

somewhere and is a perfect stranger to you--and also to the me I am used

to myself--moves my will. You see, the me inside me knows there's

something wrong. Something mighty bad--or it may be merely

inevitable--has happened to me. I went through the War all right, on a

pretty even keel, because I thought I saw a bright light at the end. I

thought we all saw the light. And the light wasn't any electric

signboard out to say there never would be any more wars, but it was a

light you could see to read by. You could see the stars and see them

differently from the old way we'd been seeing them. We could see the

moon and the Milky Way--but I suppose that comes under stars--and the

upshot of it was that we thought we saw God. And after you'd seen God,

you knew saying there shouldn't be any more war was only beginning at

the wrong end of the puzzle. Of course war is a damnable business,

perhaps the most damnable we go into because it's so wholesale. But if

you begin at the right end of the puzzle and not the wrong, the thing we

learn is that the only reality in this universe for which it's worth

going through the obscene hells of which war is one, is God. To be aware

of Him, not to explain Him. You can't explain Him. You can't explain

what He's done to you or means to do. All you can do is to keep your eye

on Him and fall in.

"I came home. I was rather cracked, when I got here, I was so pleased

with my little plaything. I'd seen God. I was only one of a good many

millions that saw Him. And it was exactly as if you went into an

enchanter's cave and expected to find some dream you'd dreamed made

real, and all you found was the Forty Thieves sitting there counting

over their spoils. No! no! it isn't an allegory. I don't mean America

and profiteers. I don't mean anybody particularly. But it began to come

over me more and more every day that we and everybody else on the round

world, if they had seen God, had forgotten all about it. Just as the

old-fashioned men at Wake Hill used to read their Bible Sunday and put

it away on the parlor table with the album and go out early Monday

morning to carry the apples to market all deaconed on top. By George! we

were the same old lot. And worse, for we'd had our look through the

peep-hole into eternities, and now we said, 'It makes my eyes ache. I'm

going to wear a shade.' No, son, I don't mean Leagues of Nations and

Internationalism or any of the quack remedies. I mean just God. We'd

been badly scared--Nan said so to-day--and we got down on our knees and

howled to the Highest and offered Him tribute.

"Now you may say that even if the whole world had forgotten God, if I'd

seen Him why couldn't I still remember Him? Why couldn't I consider the

millions of years that go to the making of man and do my little bit and

wait on His will? Because my temptation came on me. I was tempted in the

wilderness of my own credulity and conceit. For I looked back over time

past and I said like Solomon--I don't know whether he ever said it, but

he's the most blase Johnnie I remember--'All is vanity.' As it was in

the beginning, so it ever shall be. We are not made in the image of God.

We are made rather grotesquely out of dust, and to dust we shall return,

all our hopes, all our aspirations, all the pretty plans we form for

defeating death and time. And who made us and put us on this dark planet

where it is next to impossible to see a step before us? God. Who is

responsible for us? God. Can we find out His will? Never. Can we hope

for any alleviation of misery on our dark planet? Never: for if we seek

out many inventions to down disease and poverty, we shall unloose as

many by-products of discovery and bring new plagues upon us. And so I

had to turn away from God. Do you see? I didn't deny He exists. I didn't

accuse Him of bad faith to us. How can He show either good faith or bad

when He has made us no promises? He has merely set us on the dark planet

and forced us to whirl with it on the wheel of time. And so, do you see,

having turned away from God--and I had to, I had to in mere honesty--I

simply lost Him. And having lost Him, there is nothing left to lose.

Also, having once seen Him and then lost Him, I can't take up the puzzle

again. I can't play the game. If I hadn't what we New Englanders call

common sense, I suppose I should put an end to myself. What would be the

good? He would simply catch me, like a rabbit out of a cage, and chuck

me back again on the dark planet. Don't think I blame Him. He wouldn't

do it out of cruelty. He'd have to put me back. That's the way His laws

are made. So I'm going up to Wake Hill and live with Charlotte and

Jerry, and see if I can't get tired enough every day to sleep at night.

I couldn't keep on here. I couldn't. What we call civilization is too

sickening to me. I should simply go off my nut. And when you come to

that, it's an awful complication, besides the suffering of it. That I

shrink from, too. I'm talking a good deal, but actually it's the thing I

least want to do. I don't want a fuss."

Here he paused, wondered if he had more to say, thinking Dick must be

unusually dull, even for a poet, if he couldn't understand such a plain

state of things, and then took an irrational satisfaction in carefully

folding these last pages and putting them in the envelope with what he

had written first. He addressed the envelope to Dick, sealed and weighed

it, got up and stretched himself and felt distinctly better. He had, in

a way, confessed, and it was having the effect on him he had so sagely

anticipated. He could sleep to-night. And he did sleep. It was one of

the nights he used to have after long tramps about Wake Hill, when his

tired legs thrilled deliciously before they sank into a swoon of

nothingness.

In the morning, he leaped the chasm from four to six, a wakeful misery

of late, when he was accustomed to go over and over the last harassing

pages in his book of doubts. He did not wake until seven, and then it

was with a clear-eyed resumption of consciousness. And here he was,

exactly as he had found himself on other mornings when the bath of

oblivion had not been so deep. Here was his world, the world he was

trying to run away from, waiting for him in all its ordered hostilities.

Immediately it struck him full in the center that, instead of having

something less to brood upon by reason of his confession to Dick, he had

saddled himself with more. He had the letter itself to repent of. He had

given, not his unhappiness but his actual self away, and, no matter how

clearly Dick understood, he had conjured up another anguish in admitting

to his disordered inner world the lenses of another mind. This was only

a matter of a second's disconcerting thought. It was also immediately

clear to him that the letter must not go, and he spoke from his bedside

to the kitchen and gave orders that nothing should be mailed until he

came down. A contrite voice replied. The letters were mailed: that is,

the thick one on the library table. Mary had gone in last night to lock

the windows, and saw it, and knew he had forgotten to leave it in the

hall. He often did forget. It was stamped and sealed. And the furnace

man came then. Raven thought he might, in another minute, be groaning

into her sympathetic ear; so he shut her up with an assurance that it

was all right. But he felt the sweat start on his forehead at the

picture of Dick sitting down to breakfast--Dick always ordered a big

breakfast, having a hunter's appetite and a general impression that, the

more he nourished himself, the more manly it would make his nose--and

poring over the fable of his uncle's soul, or what seemed to be his

soul, with eyes strained to their limit of credulity. However, it was of

no use. Nothing was of any use when destiny had one of those ironic fits

of hers and sat down to make a caricature of you, just for the fun of

bursting her old sides over it. He dressed in a dogged haste, wondering

if he'd better telephone Dick and ask him not to open any letter he

might have from him that morning, and then dismissing it, because it had

assuredly been received and Dick was now absorbing it with his chops and

eggs.

Raven went down to his own eggs in a grim and sulky frame of mind. He

would repudiate the letter, if need be, tell Dick it was only something

he had written as a literary experiment and thought he'd try it on the

dog. But the moment he heard the boy's key in the door and then his step

through the hall, he knew he could not, for some unexplained reason

inherent in his own frame of mind, "put it over." It was as if Dick

represented the universe Raven was arraigning, was counsel for it, so to

speak, and Raven had got, in sheer decency of honor, to stand to his

guns. But it was all worse than he thought. Dick's entrance was so

quick, his onslaught so unstudied, his glance so full of alarmed

commiseration, that Raven saw at once he had been shocked out of all

manly proprieties. Dick caught at a chair, on the way to the table,

brought it with him and, placing it at a near angle to Raven's, dropped

into it as if exhausted.

"I'd no idea," he began, "why, I'd no more idea----"

Raven's hand tightened on his fork. Then he laid the fork down, for,

after all, he had finished breakfast, and might as well make the most of

running his hands into his pockets and shutting them there.

"Morning, Dick," he said. "Have in some toast and eggs?"

Dick, in no 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 considered

unworthy of him.

"Two things," said Raven. "One is to forget every blamed word of the

screed I was jackass enough to send you. The other is to give me your

word you won't mention it, even to me. Oh, there's another thing. Go

home and burn the thing up."

Dick's eyes were all a wild apprehension.

"Oh," said he, "I can't burn it. I haven't got it."

"You haven't it? Who has?"

"Nobody--not yet."

"Oh, then you've destroyed it already."

"No," said Dick miserably. "I've sent it off."

"Who to? Nan?"

"No. Mother."

Raven could hardly believe him. He did not remember any illuminating

confidences from Dick on the subject of mother, but he made no doubt the

boy looked upon her as he did, as a force too eccentrically

irresponsible to be unloosed.

"Well!" he said. The state of things struck him as too bad to be taken

otherwise than calmly. You couldn't spend on it the amount of emotion it

deserved, so you might as well get the credit with yourself and your

antagonist of an attack unexpectedly gentle. "Now, what did you think

you were doing when you sent it off to your mother?"

"Uncle Jack," said Dick, rather awkwardly blundering about his mental

armory for some reasonable defense, "she's your sister."

"Yes," said Raven, "Milly is my sister. What then?"

"Then, why, then," said Dick, "when a thing like this happens to you,

she'd feel it, wouldn't she?"

"You're perfectly sure you know what has happened to me? You trust your

own diagnosis?"

"Of course I trust it," Dick burst forth. "Your letter--why, your letter

isn't normal. Shell shock's a perfectly legitimate thing. You know it

is. You're just the one to be hit. You did perfectly crazy things over

there, entirely beyond any man of your years. And I'm mighty thankful we

can put our finger on it. For if it isn't shell shock, it's something

worse."

"You mean," said Raven, "I've gone off my nut."

Dick did not answer, but there could be no doubt of his own mental

excitement, and he was apprehensive in a measure that moved Raven to an

amused compassion. Raven sat looking at him a long minute. Then he got

up and took his newspaper from the table beside him.

"Come," he said. "We'll go into the library and see if we can get

anywhere."

Dick followed him, and they sat down together by the fire, this after

Raven had moved a third chair into the space between them. He smiled at

himself as he did it. It was the chair Nan had sat in the night before.

He had a foolish feeling that he was invoking her remembered presence,

calling on her to help them out.

"Now, Dick," he began, when they were seated, "you said something about

my letter's not being normal. What is normal, when you come to that?"

Dick frowned into the fire. This, he felt, had some hidden leading, and

he wasn't going to be caught.

"What's the use of asking fool questions?" he inquired, in his turn.

"You know."

"Can't help it," said Raven. "I've got to be Socratic. Help me out, old

man. Let me have my little game. What is normal?"

"Why," said Dick, floundering, "I suppose it's what the general run of

people think--and do. It's keeping to the rules. It's trotting on the

course. It isn't going off at some tangent of your own."

Dick felt rather proud of this, its fluency and general appositeness. He

plucked up his spirits, thinking he might be going to manage Raven,

after all.

"Now, see here," said Raven, suddenly leaning forward and looking at him

in the friendliest community of feeling, "it means a good deal when a

fellow of my years, as you say, gets a biff that sends him staggering."

"Just what I said," Dick assured him. "It's mighty serious. It's awful."

"Has it occurred to you," said Raven, "that I may be right?"

"Right? How right?"

Thereupon question and answer piled up fast.

"I've indicted the universe, as it were. How can you prove the universe

hasn't laid herself open to it? How do you know the indictment of the

creature she made and then ground under her heel isn't the very thing

she's been waiting for all these millions of years?"

"Oh, come, Jack! the universe hasn't been waiting for you. That's a part

of it, don't you see? You've got delusions, delusions of greatness,

delusions----"

"Shut up. Don't use your spurious jargon on me. Just answer my

questions. How do you know it isn't the healthiest thing that ever

happened in this rotten tissue of pretense we call civilization for even

one man--just one--to get up and swear at the whole system and swear

again that, so far as his little midge's existence goes, he won't

subscribe to it? What business have you to call that disease? How do you

know it isn't health? How do you know I'm not one of the few normal

atoms in the whole blamed carcass?"

Dick felt himself profoundly shocked. He was having to reverse his

conclusions. Uncle Jack had stood for a well ordered sanity, conversant

with wool and books and mysteriously 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.