"She knew, didn't she?" commented Nan, and he answered:
"Yes, she knew."
Here his trouble of mind broke forth. He had to be enlightened. A woman
must guess what a woman thought.
"I can't understand her," he said. "I believe I have understood her, up
to now. But to say the child's got to bear it with her! Why, a woman's
feeling about her child! It's as old as the world. A woman will
sacrifice herself, but she won't sacrifice her child."
He looked at her with such trouble in his face that Nan had to turn
away. He understood her too well. Could he read in her eyes what her
mind had resolved not to tell him? Yet she would tell him. He shouldn't
grope about in the dark among these mysteries. She wanted, as much as
Old Crow wanted it, to be a light to his feet.
"She would," she told him quietly, "sacrifice herself in a minute. Only
she can't do it the way we've offered her, because now you've come into
it."
"I've been in it from the first," frowned Raven. "Ever since the day I
found her up there in the woods."
"Yes, but then that poor crazy idiot was jealous only of him, the
creature that sat down by her at prayer-meeting; and now he's jealous of
you. And she's saving you, Rookie. At any risk. Even her own child."
Nan thought she could add what had been in her mind, keeping time to
every step of the way home: "For now she loves you better than the
child." But it proved impossible to say that, and she went out of the
room, not looking at him, and only waiting to put away her hat and coat
in the hall. She went upstairs with the same unhurried step and shut the
door of her room behind her. She stood there near the door, as if she
were guarding it against even the thoughts of any human creature. They
must not get at her, those compassionate thoughts, not Charlotte's,
certainly not Raven's. For at that moment Nan found herself a little
absurd, as many a woman has who knows herself to be starving for a man's
love. She began to tremble, and remembered Tira shaking there by the
door that morning that seemed now years away. The tremor got hold of her
savagely and shook her. It might have been shaking her in its teeth.
"Nervous chill!" said Nan to herself, insisting on saying it aloud to
see if her teeth would actually chatter and finding they did. She had
seen plenty of such nervous whirlwinds among her boys and helped to
quiet them. "I'm an interesting specimen," chattered Nan. "Talk about
_cafard_!"
All that forenoon, Dick fretted about the house, waiting for her, hoping
she would go to walk, let him read to her--Dick had a persistent habit
of reading verse to you when he found you weren't likely to get into the
modern movement by yourself--but no Nan. At dinner, there she was,
rather talkative, in a way that took Amelia into the circle of intimacy,
and seemed to link up everybody with everybody else in a nice manner.
Nan had the deftest social sense, when she troubled herself to use it.
Aunt Anne would have been proud of her.