"A step? Who's coming?"

"Charlotte. I told her I was no more afraid than up in your west chamber. Not so much: d.i.c.k and his mother can't pounce on me here. I didn't say that though. Charlotte thinks I just came over for a freak; but she's coming to stay with me."

"You don't know what Charlotte thinks," said Raven succinctly. "She's got a pretty accurate idea of all of us. You're not going to stay here.

That's flat. We'll blow out the candles in a minute or two and poke off home."

"This is home," said Nan and rubbed her cheek on his coat. "Darling Rookie!"

"You're running away from Milly," said Raven. "That's all right. I wish I could myself. But what are you going to say when she finds the house is open and you're here? I found it out and so can she. I was going by and saw the light."

"She won't go by and see the light," said Nan, from the same far distance. "Consider those pumps. She won't go out. If she does, you must just take her the other way. Head her off, Rookie, that's what you do, head her off."

"Do you know, Nan," said Raven, with a sudden resolution, "what d.i.c.k feels about you: I mean, what makes him so sore and ugly? He told me."

(There was a slight disturbance on his shoulder. Nan seemed to be shaking her head.) "He apparently can't get at you. There's something in you that baffles him, puts him off. It makes him mad as thunder. You won't let him in, Nan. You don't let him see you as you are."

"Why, Rookie!" said Nan. She sat up straight and looked him in the face.

Her eyes were beautifully calm. If her clinging to him was against the rules of this present life, nothing in her expression showed it. She was really like a child used to being loved and innocently demanding it.

"Why, Rookie, d.i.c.k's not more than half grown up."

"He writes," said Raven obstinately, aware of having really no argument.

"What kinds of books? Conventional rot. Verse. Anybody could do it by the yard. No, you needn't look like that. 'Course I couldn't! But anybody that could write at all. You could, Rookie, only you wouldn't have the face. You'd feel such a fool."

"Of course it's conventional," said Raven, "his poetry is. But that's natural enough. He belongs to the new school. You don't find him conventional himself, do you? Too conventional?"

"He's precisely like his mother," said Nan. She had the air of wanting to account for him, once for all, and sweep him out of the way. "Only she's conventional about waving her hair and uplift and belonging to societies, and he's conventional about brotherhood and a new world and being too broad-minded to be healthy. Don't you know there are crude things in a man that have got to stay there, if he is a man? War, now!

if some beast goes out on a prowl (like Germany) the normal man doesn't call it a herd madness and quote the New Testament. He gets his gun. So did d.i.c.k get his gun, but now he thinks it's all over, he's too broad-minded to live. Oh, you can laugh, Rookie, but there is such a thing as being too superior to be decent, and that's d.i.c.k. The only time I come anywhere near liking him is when he forgets to call the world a fraternal sewing circle and comes out with a healthy d.a.m.n. That's the streak of you in him. Don't you know the nicest thing about him is the streak of you?"

Raven was not aware of knowing that, but he had to own, though silently, that there was an exasperating three-quarters of d.i.c.k he himself could not, of late years, get along with. Was it youth? he wondered. Yet Nan was young. Who so sweetly sympathetic as Nan?

"Let's not talk about him," said she. "Yes, a minute more, though. I've sent off a letter to him. Charlotte was to give it to Jerry to mail on the train. It told him I shouldn't tell where I was, and I certainly shouldn't come back till he got his mother away from here. He'd simply got to do it. I told him plainly."

"And then you're going back? You promised him?"

"I didn't promise him anything. Because, how could I? I don't know how things are coming out. There's the woman."

"What woman?"

He asked this in a perfect good faith.

"Mrs. Tenney." She withdrew from him slightly. If Tira made his heart race, she wouldn't hear it. He should not be spied upon. "Don't you know," said she clearly, "I've got to see this thing through?"

"See it through?" he repeated. "You can't. She won't let you. She won't let me."

"Of course she won't let you. If the man's mad with jealousy, he won't stand another man's supporting his wife."

"I should very much doubt if she let you. She's got a loyalty--well, it's the sort you read about when a brute breaks a woman and she says she fell and hurt herself. It's been the surprise of my life that she said a word to me."

"That's easy," said Nan. "You're so awfully sorry for everybody. They feel it in you. She thought you were an archangel."

"An archangel!" groaned Raven. "Good Lord! Well, what do you propose doing?"

"Go over there to-morrow. Ask her to come here and help me get the house in order."

"Then what? Talk to her? You'll frighten her."

But he knew Nan would frighten no one, not the least of the maimed and spent.

"No, but I thought maybe if things kept happening, I could take her back with me to town, to work."

"There's the child," suggested Raven.

"Yes, that's a drawback," she owned seriously. "On the other hand, it's an advantage. The child might be made the reason: to have somebody look at him, you know. I suppose you saw he isn't quite right."

"Not right? what do you mean? Deficient?"

"I don't know," said Nan. "That or something. Deaf, maybe. But not right. I hear something. It's Charlotte. Kiss me, Rookie. On my forehead"--he did it--"on my forehead, on my right cheek, on my left cheek, on my chin. No, that's all. That's good-night, Rookie--darling Rookie! It is Charlotte. I'll let her in."

She went to the door and opened it and Charlotte appeared, done up in an old-fashioned shawl and--Raven noted in an amused incredulity--a nondescript knitted thing, old-fashioned when he was a child.

"A cloud," he said to himself. "That's what they called the thing."

He felt absurdly thankful at seeing it again. It seemed to a.s.sure him that although the surface of life might heave and sink with revolution and the fate of dynasties, Charlotte and her equipment of bed-rock integrity and clouds existed still. She paused in the doorway to take a basket from Jerry, and closed the door on him, after a casual good-night. Raven went into the hall. The basket was generous, in its oval capacity, the contents covered with a napkin.

"Want this carried upstairs?" he asked, but Charlotte shook her head.

"No," she said. "It's for her breakfast. I shall be gone 'fore light."

She lifted her sincere gaze to Raven. "I thought I'd come over," she added. "I shouldn't feel easy to have her here all alone. Jerry said he wanted I should."

Raven nodded at her and carried the basket off into the kitchen, and when he came back both women were upstairs and he heard the interchange of voices and their quick tread.

"'Night, Rookie," Nan broke off her housewifely deeds to call, and he called back:

"Good night."

Then he went out and home again, and fulfilled his destiny for the day by another somnolent hour with Milly before the fire.

XIX

Nan and Charlotte, each in a front chamber, were soon cozily in warmed sheets. But when Nan judged Charlotte must be asleep, she got up, put more wood on the dying fire, slipped on her fur coat over a wrapper, did up her knees in a blanket and sat down by the window she had not yet opened, in antic.i.p.ation of this hour of the silent night. Really she had lived for it, ever since she entered the hut and found the strange woman. The night at Raven's house had been as still as this, but there were invisible disturbances in the air; they riddled her chamber through and pierced her brain: what Amelia thought, what d.i.c.k thought. Here there was only the calm island of Charlotte's beneficence, and even that lay stiller than ever under the blanket of a tranquil sleep. She felt alone in a world that wasn't troubling itself about her, because it never troubled itself about anything.

The moon was just up above the fringe of trees at the east and shadows were black across the snow. She sat looking out with intentness as if she were there at the window for the sole purpose of watching the silent world, but really to get her mind in order for the next day and all the coming days. She felt about the heart the strange dropping we know as grief. No wonder the mortal creature, looking on at the commotions within the frail refuge of his body, should have evolved the age-old phrase that the heart bleeds. Nan's heart had been bleeding a long time.

There used to be drops on each shock of her meeting Raven after absence and finding herself put away from the old childish state of delighted possession. At first, she had believed this was one of the mysterious cruelties of Aunt Anne's inexorable delicacy of behavior; but when she grew older she had one day a great happy light of understanding, one of those floods that sweep over youth after washing at the barriers of its innocence. Rookie himself had put her away. It was one of the scrupulous things he had done for her, because she had been too ignorant to do them for herself. He had seen she was grown-up. It was true, Nan had to own, that this was one of the lines, drawn across her life, that pleased Aunt Anne most, because it removed her (or seemed to remove her) from Rookie.

Aunt Anne was jealous to her fingertips, the ends of those beautiful, delicately prisoning hands. Nan had tried never to acknowledge that. It always seemed such a barbarity to find in Aunt Anne the things that would have shocked her in herself.