"Oh," said he, "that's it, is it? So I thought."
If he thought it, he was none the less unwise in saying so. He knew that, knew the effect he had produced, and yet was powerless to modify it. Nan was plainly taken aback, and she knew why. He was destroying her happy moment, snatching it out of any possible sequence of hours here with Rookie. Dick had come and he would stay. Raven read the boy's face and was bored. He had seen that look too much of late. But he rose and went forward with the appropriate air of welcome.
"Well, old boy," said he, his hand on Dick's shoulder, "why didn't you 'phone up? There'd have been something ready for you. No matter. We'll make a raid on the pantry."
"I don't want anything," said Dick morosely.
His eyes never left Nan. They traveled from her braids to her feet. Why, his angry gaze demanded, was she sitting here in a beguiling masquerade—silly, too! The masquerade was silly. But it made her into something so unapproachable in the citadel of a childhood she had no lien on any longer that his heart ached within him. Except for that one kiss in France—a kiss so cruelly repudiated after (most cruelly because she had made it seem as if it were only a part of her largess to the War) he had found little pleasure in Nan. Yet there could be such pleasure with her. The generous beauties of her mind and heart looked to him a domain large enough for a life's exploring. But even the woman who had given him the kiss in France had vanished, withdrawn into the little girl Raven seemed to be forever wakening in her. He got out of his driving coat and stepped into the hall to drop it. When he came back, Nan had made room at the fire and Raven had drawn up another chair.
"Now," said Raven, "I'll forage for some grub."
At that, he left them, and Nan thought bitterly it was the cowardice of man. Dick was in the sulks and she was to suffer them alone.
XXVIII
Dick, looking down upon Nan, had that congealed aspect she alone had the present power of freezing him into. She knew all the possibilities of that face. There was the angry look: that had reigned of late when she flouted or denied him. There was the sulky frown, index of his jealousy of Rookie, and there had been, what seemed a long time ago, before they went through this disintegrating turmoil of war, the look of a boy's devotion. Nan had prized him very much then, when he was not flaunting angry rights over her. Now she sat perversely staring into the fire, realizing that everything about her angered him: the childish vanity of her dress, assumed, he would be sure, to charm the Rookie of old days into renewed remembrance. But he had to be faced finally, since Rookie was gone so long, stirring up Charlotte to the task of a cold bite, and with a little shrug she lifted her eyes to face exactly the Dick she had expected to see: dignified reproach in every line. Nice boy! she had the honest impartiality to give him that grace only to wish he would let her enjoy him as she easily could. What a team he and she and Rookie would be if they could only eliminate this idea of marriage. How they could make the room ring, here by the fire, with all the quips of their old memories. Yet wouldn't Dick have been an interruption, even then? Wasn't the lovely glow of this one evening the amazing reality of her sitting by the fire with Rookie alone for the first time in many years, and, if he fell into the enchantment of Malaysia and the mysteries of an empty-headed Tira, the last? And now here she was dreaming off on Rookie when she must, at this very instant, to seize any advantage at all, be facing Dick. She began by laughing at him.