"The partridges'll do for the present," said Raven grimly. "He's certainly crazy enough. He said he was shooting partridges. We'll take it at that."
Charlotte went on, and he sat thinking. So Tira had chosen not to come. So fixed was his mind on the stern exigency of the situation, as it now stood, that her disobedience in itself irritated him. The right of decision, as he reasoned, had passed out of her hands into his. He was, in a sense, holding the converging lines of all this sudden confusion; he was her commanding officer. At that moment, when he was recognizing his anger against her and far from palliating, cherishing it as one of the tools in his hand, to keep him safely away from enfeebling doubt, Milly came noiselessly down the stairs. She would, he realized, in her unflinching determination to do the efficient thing, be as silent as a shadow. She appeared in the doorway, and her face, her bearing, were no longer Milly's. This was a paper semblance of a woman, drawn on her lines, but made to express grief and terror. Quiet as she was, the shock had thrown her out of her studied calm. She was elemental woman, despising the rigidities of training, scourged into revolt. Even her dress, though fitted to the technical needs of the hour, was unstudied. Her hair, ordinarily waved, even in the country, by the intelligence of her capable fingers, was twisted in a knot on the back of her head. Raven, so effective had been the success of her ameliorating devices, thought Milly's hair conspicuously pretty. But now there was a little button of it only, as if she had prepared for exacting service where one displaced lock might undo her. A blue silk negligée was wrapped about her, with a furled effect of tightening to the blast, and her face was set in a mask of grief that was not grief alone, but terror. She came in and sat down in one of the chairs by the hearth, not relaxing in the act, but as if she could no longer stand.
"John!" she said, in a broken interrogation. "John!"
He got up and elaborately tended the fire, laying the sticks together with an extreme care, and thinking, as he did it, by one of those idle divagations of the mind, like a grace note on the full chord of action, that a failing fire had helped a man out of more than one hole in this disturbing life. It gave your strung nerves and rasped endurance a minute's salutary pause. He put down the tongs and returned to his chair.
"Buck up, Milly," said he. "Everything's being done. Now it'll be up to Dick."
But he realized, as if it were another trial setting upon him at the moment when he had borne enough, that his eyes were suddenly hot. This was not for Milly, not for himself. Again, for some obscure reason, he saw Dick's eyes, softened, childlike, as he had recalled them without their glasses. Through these past weeks of strain, he had been irritated with the boy, he had jeered at him for the extravagances of his gusty youth. Why, the boy was only a boy, after all! But Milly, leaning forward to the fire, her trembling hands over the blaze, was talking with amazing intensity, but still quietly, not to disturb the stillness of the expectant house. For the house, suddenly changed, seemed itself to be waiting, as houses do in time of trouble. Was it for Dick to die or to take on life again? Houses are seldom kind at such times, even in their outward tranquillity. They are sinister.
And when Milly began to speak, Raven found he had to deal with a woman surprisingly different from the one who had striven to heal him through her borrowed aphorisms.
"To think," she began, "to think he should escape, after being over there—over there, John, in blood and dirt and death—and come home to be shot in the back by a tramp with a gun! Where is the man? You detained him, didn't you? Don't tell me you let him go."
"I know where to find him," Raven temporized. "He'd no idea of going."
She insisted.