"Tira!" she called, and, as she came up with her, "darling Tira!"
"Why," said Tira, "you're cryin'! Don't you cry, darlin'. I never so much as thought I'd make you cry."
They put their arms about each other and their cheeks were together, wet with Nan's tears, and then—Nan thought afterward it was Tira who did it—they kissed, and loosed each other and were parted. Nan went home shaken, trembling, the tears unquenchably coming, and now she did not turn to look.
XLIV
Nan was very tired. She went to bed soon after dark and slept deeply. But she woke with the first dawn, roused into a full activity of mind that in itself startled her. There was the robin outside her window—was it still that one robin who had nothing to do but show you how bravely he could sing?—and she had an irritated feeling he had tried to call her. Her room was on the east and the dawn was still gray. She lay looking at it a minute perhaps after her eyes came open: frightened, that was it, frightened. Things seemed to have been battering at her brain in the night, and all the windows of her mind had been closed, the shutters fast, and they could not get in. But now the light was coming and they kept on battering. And whatever they wanted, she was frightened, too frightened to give herself the panic of thinking it over, finding out what she was frightened about; but she got up and hurried through her dressing, left a line on her pillow for the maid and went downstairs, out into a dewy morning. She had taken her coat, her motor cap and gloves. Once in the road she started to run, and then remembered she must not pass Tenney's running, as if the world were afire, as things were in her mind. But she did walk rapidly, and glancing up when she was opposite the house, saw the front door open as Tira had left it, and a figure in one of the back rooms outlined against the window of the front one where she and Tira had sat. That would be Tenney. He must be accounting to himself for the lonesome house, though indeed Tira would have left some word for him. When she went up the path to Raven's door she was praying to the little imps of luck that Amelia might not be the first to hear her. She tapped softly, once, twice, and then Raven's screen came up and he looked down at her. They spoke a word each.
"Hurry," said Nan.
"Wait," he answered, and put down the screen.
When he came out, Nan met him on the top step where she had been sitting, trying harder still not to be frightened. But he, too, was frightened, she saw, and that this, to him also, meant Tira.
"Get your coat," she said. "She's gone. Over to Mountain Brook."