"These old windows are draughty, too," said Raven. He paused at one of them, fumbling with the catch. Really he was watching the path. There she was, at the left, going toward her own house. He pulled down the shade and lounged back to his seat by the fire.
"You probably feel the cold," said Milly drowsily. The fur coat and blazing logs were beginning to do their blessed work. "Your vitality is low."
"Yes," said Raven piously. He would have sworn to anything. "Just so." He went on talking to Dick, and Dick caught the ball neatly, so that presently they could glance at each other in a community of understanding. "She's off!" said Raven's face, and Dick's returned, "Right you are!" while he droned on about "popple," the local word for poplar, and the right month for peeling and whether it really paid to cut it if you had to hire. Raven loved Dick at times like these, when he was neither sulky over Nan's aloofness nor didactic about democracy and free verse. Amelia choked and came awake.
"Did I," she ventured, fearing a too frank reply, "did I—make a noise?"
"No, dear," said Raven mellifluously.
If Milly had been cleverer she would have remembered that when he was deceiving her he spoke, "as if butter wouldn't melt," as if his vocal arrangements dropped oil and balm.
"Dick and I are talking out this lumber question. Don't you bother. You don't know anything about popple."
Milly, reassured, dropped her cheek, with a little breath, and closed her eyes. "Gone?" Dick telegraphed Raven, who nodded "Gone!" took a step to the door, opened it, and was himself away. He snatched, haphazard, at a hat and coat on the great chest in the hall. Dick had a way of throwing things down and leaving them where they fell. Yes, they were Dick's, and Raven hastily shoved himself into them, judging it was better, if Dick decided to go roaming, to keep him looking for them. Then he went out and down the path and along the road where Nan had gone. He came to her house and stopped, interrogating it. There was no light. Still she might be in the back part, hunting about for something she perversely couldn't wait for over night. He went up the path and tried the front door. It was fastened and he called to her. But there was no Nan, and he went back to the road and walked up and down, waiting. If she wanted a run alone in the dark, she must have it. After he had been pacing for what seemed to him a long time, he heard voices and the crunch of snow. One voice was hers, and he went on to meet it. The other, a man's, short-syllabled, replied at intervals. Nan seemed to be holding forth. They were coming on briskly, Nan and a tall figure at the other side of the road. She had seen Raven and called, clearly, though not with any implication of relief:
"That you, Rookie?"
He came up to them and saw, with a surprise out of all proportion to the event, in this neighborhood where anybody might join anybody else in familiar intercourse, that it was Tenney. They stopped, Tenney a step behind her. It looked as if he understood he had fulfilled his civility to her and could be dismissed.