"So we will be," said Nan. She was retreating toward the door. There were simple natural things she wanted at that moment. She wanted to go to him, put her arms about him, mother or child arms, as he might wish, and bid him a good-by that would wrap him about like a cloak while they were absent one from the other. He should have her lips as he had her heart. Nan was an adventurer on the high seas of life. She cared very little whether her boat rode the wave or sank, so it could unload the gold and gems it carried on the sand of the world she loved. Rookie was the home of her heart. The gold was all for him. But if he did not want it--and meantime she was at the door. "Don't get up," she said, "to see me off. If you do, he will, too, and there'll be more fireworks. No, no, Rookie. Don't look like that. I'm not hateful about him, really, only he has spoiled my fun." "Why you should go," said Raven, advancing; "why you should leave this house just because he's come!" "No fun!" said Nan. "Do you see us, the three of us, sitting down to meals together? No, Rookie. Can't be done. Good night." Here she did turn definitely and went up the stairs, and Raven presently followed. In his room he stood for a moment thinking, not of Dick, who was troublesome, in an irritating way incident to biting young cubs just aware of their teeth, but of the challenge that was Nan. Here she was, all beauty, all wisdom, in the natal gifts of her, telling him, with every breath, she loved him and only him. And yet, his knowledge of life was quick to answer, it was the accretion of long hungers, the sum of all desires since she was little and consigned to Aunt Anne's delicate frigidities for nurture and, as the event proved, for penury. She had no conception of a love as irresistible as hers was now abounding. In a year or two, youth would meet her on the road of youth, and they would kiss and old Rookie would become the dim duty of remembered custom. And as he thought these things, his overwhelming revolt against earth and its cruelty came over him, and he stood there gripping his hands into their palms, again at open war with life. It was a question without an answer, a hunger unfed, a promise broken. Eternal life was the soporific distilled by man, in his pathetic cunning, to dull the anguish of anticipated death. Standing there in the silence, he felt the waves of loneliness going over him, and thought of Nan in her chamber across the hall, angelic in her compassion, her arms ready for him as a mother is ready for her child. The moonlight made arabesques on the walls, and he walked to the window with an instinctive craving for the open. He stood gripping the casing with both hands and looking up over the hillside where also the light lay revealingly. Up there was the hut where Tira might be now if Tenney had not wounded himself, fleeing in her turn from earthly cruelty. Up there Old Crow had lived in his own revolt against earth cruelty.