Then he wondered what Nan was saying to Raven at the moment, remembered also Raven's injunction to play a square game with her and, though his feet were twitching to carry him back to the library, sat doggedly down at his mother's hearth and encouraged her to talk interminably. Amelia was delighted. She didn't know Dick had so earnest an interest in the Federation of Clubs and her popular course in economics. She was probably never more sustainedly intelligent than in that half hour, until Dick heard Nan going up to bed, sighed heavily, and lost interest in the woman citizen.
Nan and Raven, standing by the fire, in their unexpected minute of solitude, looked at each other and smiled in recognizing that they were alone and that when that happened things grew simple and straight. To Raven there was also the sense of another presence. Anne had somehow been invoked. Amelia, with her unfailing dexterity in putting her foot in, had done it: but still there Anne was, with the unspoken question on her silent lips. What was he going to do? He knew her wish. Presently he would have her money. He caught the interrogation in Nan's eyes. What was he going to do?
"I don't know, Nan," he said. "I don't know."
"Never mind," said Nan. "You'll know when the time comes."
And he was aware that she was still in her mood of forcing him on to make his own decisions. But, easily as he read her mind, there were many things he did not see there. It was a turmoil of questions, and of these the question of Aunt Anne was least. Did he love Tira? This headed the list. Did he want to tear down his carefully built edifice of culture and the habit of conventional life, and run away with Tira to elemental simplicities and sweet deliriums? And if he did love Tira, if he did want to tear down his house of life and live in the open, she would help him. But all she said was:
"Good night, Rookie. I'm sleepy, too."
To leap a dull interval of breakfast banalities is to find Nan, on a crisp day, blue above and white below, at the Tenneys' door. Tira, frankly apprehensive, came to let her in. Tira had had a bad night. The burning of the crutch fanned a fire of torment in her uneasy mind. She had hardly slept, and though she heard Tenney's regular breathing at her side, she began to have a suspicion it was not a natural breathing. She was persuaded he meant now to keep track of her, by night as well as day. It began to seem to her a colossal misfortune that the crutch was not there leaning against the foot of the bed, and now its absence was not so much her fault as a part of its own malice. Nan, noting the worn pallor of her face and the dread in her eyes, gathered that Tenney was at home. She put out her hand, and Tira, after an instant's hesitation, gave hers. Nan wondered if she were in a terror wild enough to paralyze her power of action. Still, she had given her hand, and when Nan stepped up on the sill, with a cheerful implication of intending, against any argument, to come in, she stood aside and followed her. But at the instant of her stepping aside, Nan was aware that she threw both hands up slightly. It was the merest movement, an unstudied gesture of despair. Tenney was sitting by the kitchen stove, and Nan went to him with outstretched hand.
"I thought I should find you if I came early enough," she said. "How's your foot?"
She had a direct address country folk liked. She was never "stand-off," "stuck-up." It was as easy talking with her as with John Raven.
"Some better, I guess," said Tenney. He eyed her curiously. Had Raven sent her, for some hidden reason, to spy out the land?