Glancing cheerfully up, he was instantly aware, from the boy's unhappy face, that Dick believed him. Raven burst into a laugh, but he quickly sobered. What a snare they were getting themselves into, and only by an impish destiny of haphazard speech.
"Don't look so shocked, Dickie," he said flippantly. "I'm no more dotty than—Hamlet."
There he stopped again to wonder whimsically at the ill fate of it all. For Hamlet was mad; at least, Dick thought so. He couldn't have caught at anything more injurious to his cause.
"'They fool me to the top of my bent,'" he reflected ruefully.
That was what Dick was ready to do. But sister Amelia wouldn't fool him, if she got East with her emergency dressing bag and her perfectly equipped energy. She would clap him into the Psychopathic before he had time for even half as much blank verse as Hamlet had. They wouldn't allow him a first act.
"Don't look like that," he suggested again and kindly, because it was evident that, however irritating Dick might be as a prospective guardian, he was actually suffering an honest misery.
"I don't," said Dick. "I mean, I don't mean to look different. But somehow it's got me, this whole business has, and I can't get away from it. I've thought of it every minute since you told me. It isn't so much you I'm thinking about. It's him."
Raven, as a writer of English, paused to make a mental note that, in cases of extreme emotion, the nominative case, after the verb to be, is practically no good. You simply have to scrap it.
"Who?" he inquired, in the same line of natural language.
"Old Crow."