He began with the day when he had found Tira in the woods. He touched on the facts briefly, omitting to confess what the woman looked to his dazzled eyes. It was a drawing austerely black and white. Could he tell anyone—anyone but Nan—how she had seemed to him there, the old, old picture of motherhood, divine yet human? It was too much to risk. If he did lay his mind bare about that moment which was his alone, and Dick met it with his unimaginative astuteness, he could not trust himself to be patient with the boy. He said little more than that he had given her the freedom of the hut, and that he meant always to have it ready for her. Then he came to this last night of all, when she had run away from Tenney, not because he had been violent, but because he had "kept still." That did take hold on Dick's imagination, the imagination he seemed able to divorce from the realities of life and kept for the printed page.
"By thunder!" he said. "Burned the crutch, did she? That's a story in itself, a real story: Mary Wilkins, Robert Frost. That's great!"
"Sounds pretty big to me," said Raven quietly. "But it's not for print. See you don't feel tempted to use it. Now, here we are with Tira up against it. She's got to make a quick decision. And she's made it."
"Do you call her by her first name?" asked Dick, leaping the main issue to frown over the one possibly significant of Raven's state of mind.
"Yes," said Raven steadily, "I rather think I call her by her first name. I don't know whether I ever have 'to her head,' as Charlotte would say, but I don't seem to feel like calling her by Tenney's name. Well, Tira's decided. She's going to give her baby to Nan."
Dick's eyes enlarged to such an extent, his mouth opened so vacuously, that Raven laughed out. Evidently Dick wasn't regarding the matter from Tira's standpoint, or even Raven's now, but his own.
"Nan!" he echoed, when he could get his lips into action. "Where does Nan come in?"
"Oh," said Raven, with a most matter-of-fact coolness, "Nan came in long ago. I told her about it, and it seems she went to see Tira off her own bat, and offered to take the baby."
"She sha'n't do it," proclaimed Dick. "I simply won't have it, that's all."
"I fancy," said Raven, "Nan'll tell you you've got nothing whatever to do with it. And really, Dick, you never'll get Nan by bullying her. Don't you know you won't?"