"Nervous chill!" said Nan to herself, insisting on saying it aloud to see if her teeth would actually chatter and finding they did. She had seen plenty of such nervous whirlwinds among her boys and helped to quiet them. "I'm an interesting specimen," chattered Nan. "Talk about _cafard_!" All that forenoon, Dick fretted about the house, waiting for her, hoping she would go to walk, let him read to her--Dick had a persistent habit of reading verse to you when he found you weren't likely to get into the modern movement by yourself--but no Nan. At dinner, there she was, rather talkative, in a way that took Amelia into the circle of intimacy, and seemed to link up everybody with everybody else in a nice manner. Nan had the deftest social sense, when she troubled herself to use it. Aunt Anne would have been proud of her. XXXVI Then everything, so far as Raven and Nan were concerned, quieted to an unbroken commonplace, and the four--for Amelia and Dick held to their purpose of "standing by"--again settled down to country life, full of the amenities and personal abnegations of a house party likely to be continued. Charlotte was delighted, in her brooding way, and ascribed the emotion to Jerry who, she said, "liked somethin' goin' on." Nan and Dick had vaulted back to their past: the old terms of a boy and girl intimacy in robust pursuits admitting much laughter and homespun talk. They went snowshoeing over the hills, Raven, though Nan begged him to come, electing to stay at home with Amelia, who would stand at the door to see them off, half persuaded she was up to going herself and, indeed, almost feeling she had gone, after considering it so exhaustively, and then retreating to the library where she was cramming for next year's economics. Raven was very good to her. He would sit down by the blazing hearth, listening with an outward interest to her acquired formulae of life, and then, after perfunctory assent or lax denial, retire to his own seclusion over a book. But he seldom read nowadays. He merely, in this semblance of studious absorption, found refuge from Amelia. He was mortally anxious for Tira, still face to face with brute irresponsibility, and when the mental picture of it flamed too lividly and could not be endured, he threw down his book and hurried up to the hut, to find her. She never came. The fire, faithfully laid for her, was unlighted. The room breathed the loneliness of a place that has known a beloved presence and knows it no more. Nearly every day he and Nan had a word about her, and often he saw Nan going "up along" and knew she was, in the uneasiness of no news, bent on walking past the house, if only for a glance at the windows and the sight of Tira's face. Three times within a few weeks Tenney had driven past, and each time Nan, refusing Dick's company, hurried up the road. But she came back puzzled and dispirited, and called to Raven, who, in a fever of impatience, had gone out to meet her: "No. The door is locked."