"Rookie, my darling," said Nan, seeing no reason why she shouldn't give him the precious thing back again, "I'm terrible glad you've come. Charlotte tell you?" She put her cheek against his for a minute, took her arms away and turned into the west sitting-room where a fire was leaping and making soft, living shadows on the ceiling. In the middle of the room she stopped him with a hand on his arm. "Look at the shadows," she said, in a low voice, as if they might hear and flee away. "It's exactly as if they lived here all the time and waited for us to come back to them. Look at the ones behind those candlesticks. They've always been just like this, little old scholarly gentlemen in queer hats walking along a London street. I used to think they were going to old second-hand shops to buy old second-hand books. I wouldn't have those candlesticks moved by half an inch for fear the shadows would get mad and go with them. Sit down, Rookie, there where you used to read to me. I'll light up, so we can see each other." He did sit down without waiting for her, on the little squat, old-fashioned sofa, and Nan went about the room with her match and dotted it with candles. Raven looked after her in her housewifely progress; he was still concerned, still grave over her leaving his house for this. She had on her walking suit, whatever frills she might have discovered upstairs, and she looked ready for outdoor enterprise. What a hardy child she was, slender and supple, but taut for action in the homespun service of the day! She threw her match into the fire and came to him, sat down beside him and, like the Nan of a hundred years ago, her childhood and his youth, put her head down on his shoulder. "Nan," said he, abandoning what he sometimes considered the heavy father attitude and jamming the silky head down into its hollow, "what did you do it for? Didn't you like my house?" "Yes, Rookie darling," she said, in a tone of drowsy happiness. "I meant to stay--truly I did--and cut in when Mrs. Powell tried to get you to give yourself away so she could tell her alienists how crazy you are. But if I had, Dick would have stayed, too. He never'd have gone, never in the world. And he's so quarrelsome." "How do you know he's gone?" Raven asked. "Why, of course he has. He would, the minute he thought I had. Hasn't he?" "Yes," said Raven, "he has. Nan, why the dickens do you treat him so? You mean to take him in the end." "Do I?" asked Nan, still most contentedly. "Rookie, what a lot you know. Wake me if you hear a step." "A step? Who's coming?" "Charlotte. I told her I was no more afraid than up in your west chamber. Not so much: Dick and his mother can't pounce on me here. I didn't say that though. Charlotte thinks I just came over for a freak; but she's coming to stay with me."