This Raven, coming back through the hall, heard.
"Good Lord!" he said to himself. "Good Lord!"
So these two, with all the forces of probability and beckoning fortune pushing them together, could not approach even within hailing distance. It was the hideous irony of a world bent on disorder. He walked in on them with a consciously grave aspect of recalling them to their more reasonable selves.
"What are you two scrapping for?" he inquired, and Nan looked at him humbly. She hated to have him bothered by inconsiderable persons like herself and Dick. "Don't you know you've got the universe in your fists for the last time you'll ever have it? You're young——"
There he stopped awkwardly in the enumeration of their presumable blessedness. It was Nan's face that stopped him. It had paled out into a gravity surprising to him: a weariness he had often expected to see on it after her work abroad, but had not yet found there.
"Yes," she said, in a tone that matched her tired face, "we're young enough, if that's all."
The talk displeased her. Nan never liked people to be dull and smudgy with disorderly moods. She kept a firm hand on her own emotions and perhaps she could not remember a time when they had got away from her under other eyes. Aunt Anne was partly responsible for that, and partly the proud shyness of her type.
"No, Rookie," she said, "we won't fight. Not here, anyway. Not in your house."
She held out a careless hand to Dick, who looked at it an instant and then turned sulkily away. "Young cub!" Raven thought. He should have kissed it, even gone on his knees to do it, and placated her with a laughing extravagance. He recalled the words he had caught from her lips when he was coming in and flushed to his forehead over the ringing warmth of them. He bent to the fine hand about relaxing to withdrawal, after Dick's flouting, drew it to his own lips and kissed it: not as he would have had Dick do it but yet with all his heart. As he lifted his head he smiled into her eyes, and their look smote him. It was as if he had somehow hurt her.
"O Rookie!" she said, under her breath.