Then everything, so far as Raven and Nan were concerned, quieted to an
unbroken commonplace, and the four--for Amelia and Dick held to their
purpose of "standing by"--again settled down to country life, full of
the amenities and personal abnegations of a house party likely to be
continued. Charlotte was delighted, in her brooding way, and ascribed
the emotion to Jerry who, she said, "liked somethin' goin' on." Nan and
Dick had vaulted back to their past: the old terms of a boy and girl
intimacy in robust pursuits admitting much laughter and homespun talk.
They went snowshoeing over the hills, Raven, though Nan begged him to
come, electing to stay at home with Amelia, who would stand at the door
to see them off, half persuaded she was up to going herself and, indeed,
almost feeling she had gone, after considering it so exhaustively, and
then retreating to the library where she was cramming for next year's
economics. Raven was very good to her. He would sit down by the blazing
hearth, listening with an outward interest to her acquired formulae of
life, and then, after perfunctory assent or lax denial, retire to his
own seclusion over a book. But he seldom read nowadays. He merely, in
this semblance of studious absorption, found refuge from Amelia. He was
mortally anxious for Tira, still face to face with brute
irresponsibility, and when the mental picture of it flamed too lividly
and could not be endured, he threw down his book and hurried up to the
hut, to find her. She never came. The fire, faithfully laid for her, was
unlighted. The room breathed the loneliness of a place that has known a
beloved presence and knows it no more. Nearly every day he and Nan had a
word about her, and often he saw Nan going "up along" and knew she was,
in the uneasiness of no news, bent on walking past the house, if only
for a glance at the windows and the sight of Tira's face. Three times
within a few weeks Tenney had driven past, and each time Nan, refusing
Dick's company, hurried up the road. But she came back puzzled and
dispirited, and called to Raven, who, in a fever of impatience, had gone
out to meet her:
"No. The door is locked."
She would put a hand on his arm and they would walk together while she
told him her unvarying tale. When she had knocked persistently, Tira
would appear at the chamber window, and shake her head, and her lips
seemed to be saying, "No! no! no!" And each time Tenney returned
shortly, and they were sure his going was a blind. He never went to the
street, and even Charlotte remarked the strangeness of his short
absences.
"What under the sun makes Isr'el Tenney start out an' turn round an'
come back ag'in?" she inquired of Jerry. "He ain't gone twenty minutes
'fore he's home."