"I don't say it," Raven asserted. "We're not going to the dogs. We've gone. We're there. We're the dogs ourselves, and nothing worse could happen to a criminal—from Mars, for example—than to be sent to us. We ought to be the convict colony of the universe."
"Don't," said Dick, with an affectionate sweetness as exasperating as it was moving. "It only excites you. Come on out and have a tramp. We could motor out to——"
"O Lord!" groaned Raven. "Why don't you beguile me up to the Psychopathic?"
Then he was, for the first time, aghast at what he had set going. Dick was looking at him again with that suffused glance of an affection too great to mind disclosing itself in all its pathetic abnegation.
"I couldn't say it myself," he began brokenly. "But you've said it; you see yourself. If you would——"
There he stopped and Raven sat staring at him. He felt as if the words had got inside his body and were somehow draining his heart. When he spoke, his voice sounded hoarse in his own ears.
"Dick, old man," he said, "I'm not—that."
"No! no!" Dick hastened to assure him, and somehow his hand had found Raven's and gripped it. "Only—O good God!" he ended, and got out of his chair and turned his back.
Raven, too, rose.
"Dick," said he quietly, "you go home now. And don't you speak about this to anybody, not to Nan even. You understand."