"And what," inquired Raven, curiously, "is the best thing?"
"My idea," she said, pelting on in her habitual manner of manipulation without much regard to the material she was working on, "would be for you to see an alienist."
"I thought," he was beginning mildly, and paused, with a sense of danger. He must, he saw, forego the fun of chaffing her from his awareness that the professional gentleman was to have been sprung on him to-day, and that he knew equally the infliction could only be deferred. But how, she would have questioned, did he get his news? Not, he would have to convince her, through Nan. He amended his attack. "Why didn't you scare one up and bring him along?"
She frowned. Amelia was always restive under raillery.
"We needn't," she said, "go into that. I did hope to arrange it, but Dick upset things frightfully. He has behaved badly, very badly indeed. I hope now to persuade you to call in Doctor Brooke yourself. I should suppose he'd recommend your going into a sanitarium. However, we can't judge till we see what he says. Only, John"—and here she looked at him with some appearance of anxiety, as not knowing how he would take it—"you must give yourself into our hands."
"Whose hands?" asked Raven. "Yours? Dick's?"
"Oh, dear, no, not Dick's." Again she mentally champed her bit. Evidently Dick had exhausted her forbearance on the way up. "He's behaved like a——" Invention failed her. "I do wish," she ended plaintively, "the modern young man and woman had a vestige of respect left—only a vestige—for their elders. They're queerness itself. Now Nan! there's Nan. What's she posting off up here for and settling herself in your house"—in the west chamber, Raven's inner mind ironically supplied—"and acting as if you couldn't pry her out?"
"You can't," said Raven. "Nan's here and I'm going to keep her, all winter, if she doesn't get bored."
Amelia gave a little staccato shriek.
"All winter? I can't stay here all winter."