"I wish you'd stay," he said, watching her in her pretty haste. "I don't mean here: over with me. Come on, Nan. Amelia's settled down for good. She won't bother you—much. Anyhow, you can run off up to the hut."
Then he remembered what other fugitive she might find at the hut, and saw she, too, remembered. Her words came pat upon it.
"The Tenneys are going to have a prayer-meeting Wednesday night."
"A prayer-meeting!" He heard himself echoing it incredulously.
"Yes, and you're to take me, Rookie. Don't scowl. I've got to see that man when he worships his idols, and you've got to see him, too. His god must be an idol: burnt offerings, that sort of thing. Perhaps that's what he's doing it all for: offering her up, as a kind of sacrifice. His wife, I mean. What's her name, Rookie?"
"Thyatira," said Raven, and got up, his mind suddenly dense to the comfortable picture of Nan and her dinner, and went home.
XX
The next few days went by, all alike cloudless and uneventful within the house. Nan coaxed Charlotte into bringing her over meat and vegetables, and, with a plea of liking it, cooked them herself. Raven swung back and forth between the houses, but Nan found him silent and, she decided, cross. Every day he went up to the hut to see whether the fire had been lighted, and every day found the place in its chilly order. It seemed to him as if the whole tragic background against which Tira had been moving had been wiped away by some wide sweeping sponge of oblivion, as if he had dreamed the story or at least its importance in his own life, as if Nan had always been living alone in her house, and Amelia, tied up in Charlotte's aprons, her lips compressed in implacable resolution, always going through trunks in the attic, searching for a mottled book. He had no compunction over Amelia. Let her search, he thought, when Charlotte came to him with a worried brow and asked if he didn't think he could put it somewheres in sight, so's 't she should know 'twas no use. Do her good. If she didn't like it she could go back to her clubs and her eugenics and her Freudians. And when the evening of the prayer-meeting came he looked out at the brilliant weather, judged that the immediate region might seize upon it as an excuse for sleigh-riding, and was returning to his book for a brief minute more, when Amelia called from the window:
"Three sleighs! Where can they be going?"