"Dick," said Raven, "in the name of all the gods you worship, what shouldn't I be told? And exactly how do you see us two living along here, mild as milk? What's our relation? Sometimes, when I find you plodding after me, I feel as if you were my trainer. Sometimes I have a suspicion I really am off my nut and you're my keeper. Out with it, boy? How do you see it? Come!" Dick, from a patent embarrassment, was staring down at the hearth, and now he looked quickly up in a frankness truly engaging. "Jack," he said, "you needn't think you're going to be left here alone, to work things out by yourself. There's no danger of mother. I told her to keep off. She only irritates you. But she hasn't gone back home. She's right there in Boston, waiting to come." Raven got up and walked back and forth through the room. Then he returned to his chair. "Dick," he said conversationally, "if you were as young in years as you are in your mind, I'd mellow you." Dick generously ignored this. He had the impeccable good nature of the sane set in authority over the sick. "What I think, is," he said, with a soothing intonation Raven despairingly recognized as the note of strength pitting itself against weakness, "we can work it out together, you and I. We can do it better than anybody else. I suppose if I went back you'd send for Nan. But that won't do, Jack. You'll see it for yourself, when you're all right again. Now what I mean about Old Crow is, that his complexes are like yours--or rather yours are like his. Don't you see what an influence he's had on you? More than Miss Anne even." "Hold up," said Raven. "I'm being mighty patient with you, but certain things, you know, you don't say." "You used to go up there and see him," said Dick, willingly relinquishing Miss Anne. There were times when, as he remembered from boyhood, old Jack was dangerous. "Some of the things about him shocked you. Some appealed to you. Pity, too: you must have pitied him tremendously. You probably knew about his craze over this girl he mentions here. You may have heard things about her, just as he did. Jack, I can see--the whole thing has come to me in the last ten minutes--Old Crow has been the big influence in your life. Everything else has come from that. And then the war knocked you out and you got _cafard_ and the whole blasted business blew up and came to the surface and--there you are." "Yes," said Raven, "here we are." He leaned back in his chair and laughed until he could have cried. Never had he found anything funnier than the boy's honest face and his honest voice pouring forth undigested scraps from haphazard gleanings. "Dick," he said, "you're a dear fellow. But you're an awful ass. The trouble is with you, old man, you've no imagination. It was left out. You're too much like your mother and it'll be the death of you as it is of her if you don't stop being intelligent. That sort of popular science stuff, you know. Be a little sloppy, boy. Come off your high horse."