Dick, without much heart, began to read, and Raven lighted a pipe. First, a tribute to Nan's abstinence, he passed her the cigarettes, and when she shook her head, smiled back at her, as if he reminded her of secrets they had together. Presently she got up, and Dick, closing the book, threw it on the table. "Bed?" Raven asked, also getting up, and Nan said good night and was gone. The two men sat down, each with the certainty that here they were to stick until something determining had been said, Raven irritated by the prospect and Dick angrily ready. "Well," said Raven, indicating the book, "what do you think?" "That?" said Dick absently. "Oh, I don't know. Somebody trying to write without knowing how?" Raven gave it up. Either he had not read far, or he had not hungered or battled enough to be moved by it. "Now, look here," said Dick, "I may not be interested in that, but there's something I am interested in. And we've got to talk it out, on the spot." "Well!" said Raven. He mended the fire which didn't need it, and then sat down and filled his pipe. He wasn't smoking so very much but, he thought, with a bored abandonment to the situation, gratefully taking advantage of a pipe's proneness to go out. While he attended to it he could escape the too evidently condemnatory gaze from those young eyes that never wavered, chiefly because they could not be deflected by a doubt of perfectly apprehending everything they saw. "Now," said Dick, plunging, "what do you want to do this kind of thing for?" "What kind of thing?" asked Raven, lighting up. "Smoke?" Dick looked at him accusingly, sure of his own rightness and the clarity of the issue. "You know," he said. "This business. Compromising Nan."