"I thought," he was beginning mildly, and paused, with a sense of danger. He must, he saw, forego the fun of chaffing her from his awareness that the professional gentleman was to have been sprung on him to-day, and that he knew equally the infliction could only be deferred. But how, she would have questioned, did he get his news? Not, he would have to convince her, through Nan. He amended his attack. "Why didn't you scare one up and bring him along?" She frowned. Amelia was always restive under raillery. "We needn't," she said, "go into that. I did hope to arrange it, but Dick upset things frightfully. He has behaved badly, very badly indeed. I hope now to persuade you to call in Doctor Brooke yourself. I should suppose he'd recommend your going into a sanitarium. However, we can't judge till we see what he says. Only, John"--and here she looked at him with some appearance of anxiety, as not knowing how he would take it--"you must give yourself into our hands." "Whose hands?" asked Raven. "Yours? Dick's?" "Oh, dear, no, not Dick's." Again she mentally champed her bit. Evidently Dick had exhausted her forbearance on the way up. "He's behaved like a----" Invention failed her. "I do wish," she ended plaintively, "the modern young man and woman had a vestige of respect left--only a vestige--for their elders. They're queerness itself. Now Nan! there's Nan. What's she posting off up here for and settling herself in your house"--in the west chamber, Raven's inner mind ironically supplied--"and acting as if you couldn't pry her out?" "You can't," said Raven. "Nan's here and I'm going to keep her, all winter, if she doesn't get bored." Amelia gave a little staccato shriek. "All winter? I can't stay here all winter." "Dear old Milly, no," said Raven, with the utmost gentleness. "I wouldn't have you for the world. It's Nan that's going to stay." "Why," said Amelia, "it isn't decent. You're not an old man, John. Sometimes you don't even look middle-aged." "You said I was," he reminded her. "You said I was so old I went and got _cafard_." "Besides," said Amelia, clutching at her vanishing argument, "age has nothing to do with it. The older you are the more ridiculous they get over you, these romantic girls. And you'd cut in and take her away from Dick, right under his nose." Raven suddenly tired of it. "Amelia," he said, "don't be a fool. And don't say that sort of odious thing about Nan. I won't have it. Nan's a child." "Oh, no," said Amelia, shaking her waved head with an air of doom. "Nan's no child. Don't make any mistake about that. She's no child." At this, Raven found he was so unreasonably tired of her that he had to call himself to order and wonder if he really could be disgusted with Amelia, old Milly who was such a sophisticated fool and yet meant so well by everybody that you had to keep reproving yourself when you were tempted to consign her--elsewhere.