Charlotte gave him a serious, perhaps a warning look, he remembered afterward, and went out of the room. "You recall it, don't you," Amelia continued, "how you had diphtheria after Uncle John's death, and father had it next week." "Yes," said Raven, tasting the unchanged bitterness of an old misery. That had been one of the points where his life turned. His father had taken the infection from him and nearly died, and the child he was then had never been able to escape a shuddering belief that he might have been guilty of his father's death. That had made him turn the more passionately to the task of lightening his mother's burden in the wild anxiety he had caused her. Poor little boy, he thought, poor little fool! Making his life a business of compensating somebody for something, and never, until these later years, even seeing the visible path his own feet should have taken. He forgot Amelia and showed himself so absent that she got huffy and fell into silence and only when he left the room did she remind him: "Don't forget the journal. You'd better run up and look for it now." He did go upstairs, really with an idea it might be best to run over the journal before Amelia pounced on it and turned it, in some manner, to his own undoing. At the head of the stairs stood Charlotte, waiting. One hand was under her apron. She stepped silently into his room, tacitly inviting him to follow, and brought out the hand and the mottled book. "Here," she said. "Here 'tis. You lay it away safe some'r's. Don't seem to me I'd let anybody see it, if I's you, till you've been over it yourself." Raven, with a nod of understanding, took the book, put it into his desk drawer and turned the key, and Charlotte hurried away to her kitchen. When he went downstairs again, he found Amelia at the open door. She was all an excitement of anticipation. "Law, Milly," said he, in the country phrasing he loved to use to her when she was most securely on her high horse of the cultured life, "you look as nervous as a witch." "Where is it?" said Amelia, beating a tattoo of impatience, with one hand, on the door. "You've been up attic, haven't you?" "Bless you, no," said Raven. "I can't go up attic now. I've got to do an errand for Charlotte." This was true. Nan's dinner had to be carried over. "You run up, there's a good girl. Give you something to do. No! no!" She was turning toward the kitchen. "Don't you go bothering Charlotte. I won't have it. Cut along." And Amelia did, in a dignified haste, to show him how journals were found, and later, when the moment came, Raven went with his hot hamper to Nan's. She met him at the door, no such overflowing Nan as last night, but serenely practical and quite settled into the accustomed comforts of her house.