"'Bye," he said. "I'll be back for supper."
Before she could answer, he was gone. Now he was afraid she might say, with an ill-timed acquiescence, that after all she would have a little walk, and he knew he simply couldn't stand it. By the fire, making an inexorable assault on his senses, the calm, steady beat of her futile talk could be borne. You bore it by listening through a dream. But out of doors, when the crisp air had waked you, you'd simply have to swear or run. He did run, snatching his hat as he went, up the road toward Tenney's. It was not a reasoned flight, but he did want to calm himself by the light burning through their windows, perhaps a glimpse of Tira moving about. The night was going to be clear and not too cold for pleasant lingering. Over beyond the rising slope opposite Nan's house he heard an owl hooting and, nearer, the barking of a fox. He turned that way and stood facing the dark slope. He knew what those trees were in spring, pink and light brown in the marshes at the foot of the rise, running up into a mist of sunshine with islands of evergreen. Then, turning to go on, he cast a glance at the house and stopped with a word of surprise. There was a light. Somebody had broken in (an incredible happening here) and was beguiled by loneliness and silence into an absurd security. He turned into the path and went softly up to the front door, lifted the latch and was stepping in when some one came. It was Nan. She was in the hall, a pile of blankets in her arms. Seeing him, she did not start, only laughed a little, all the mischief of her face running into it and waking it like the sun on moving water.
"Nan," said Raven, "Nan, my darling, why are you here?"
Nan did the incredible thing. She laid her pile of blankets in a chair, came back to him and deliberately put arms over his shoulders and about his neck. Her face, beautifully sweet in its new flush, was close to his. It might well be flushed, for he had called her darling, and Nan, feeling lorn and bewildered in losing the Rookie she used to think she knew, felt for the instant that she had got home again. She had lost him, she felt, when she saw the shaken look he gave the strange beautiful woman up in the hut. Now here he was again, quite the same, only it was true that she had not seemed to be, for years, what he called her now.
"Rookie, my darling," said Nan, seeing no reason why she shouldn't give him the precious thing back again, "I'm terrible glad you've come. Charlotte tell you?" She put her cheek against his for a minute, took her arms away and turned into the west sitting-room where a fire was leaping and making soft, living shadows on the ceiling. In the middle of the room she stopped him with a hand on his arm. "Look at the shadows," she said, in a low voice, as if they might hear and flee away. "It's exactly as if they lived here all the time and waited for us to come back to them. Look at the ones behind those candlesticks. They've always been just like this, little old scholarly gentlemen in queer hats walking along a London street. I used to think they were going to old second-hand shops to buy old second-hand books. I wouldn't have those candlesticks moved by half an inch for fear the shadows would get mad and go with them. Sit down, Rookie, there where you used to read to me. I'll light up, so we can see each other."
He did sit down without waiting for her, on the little squat, old-fashioned sofa, and Nan went about the room with her match and dotted it with candles. Raven looked after her in her housewifely progress; he was still concerned, still grave over her leaving his house for this. She had on her walking suit, whatever frills she might have discovered upstairs, and she looked ready for outdoor enterprise. What a hardy child she was, slender and supple, but taut for action in the homespun service of the day! She threw her match into the fire and came to him, sat down beside him and, like the Nan of a hundred years ago, her childhood and his youth, put her head down on his shoulder.
"Nan," said he, abandoning what he sometimes considered the heavy father attitude and jamming the silky head down into its hollow, "what did you do it for? Didn't you like my house?"
"Yes, Rookie darling," she said, in a tone of drowsy happiness. "I meant to stay—truly I did—and cut in when Mrs. Powell tried to get you to give yourself away so she could tell her alienists how crazy you are. But if I had, Dick would have stayed, too. He never'd have gone, never in the world. And he's so quarrelsome."
"How do you know he's gone?" Raven asked.
"Why, of course he has. He would, the minute he thought I had. Hasn't he?"