Yes, Raven thought, something always does, and sometimes, in country tragedies, so brutal a thing that the remorseful mind shudders at itself for not preventing it. But Nan, equably as she might counsel him, was herself apprehensive. She expected something. She had a sense of waiting for it. Dick must be prepared. He must be found on their side. Whatever the outcome, Raven must not suffer the distrust and censure of his own house. Dick had been reading to her by the fire while Raven was taking Amelia for a sober walk. Nan wished Dick wouldn't read his verse to her. It made her sorry for him. What was he doing, a fellow who had seen such things, met life and death at their crimson flood, pottering about in these bizarre commonplaces of a literary jog-trot? They sounded right enough, if you stood for that kind of thing, but they betrayed him, his defective imagination, his straining mind. He didn't see the earth as it was. He was so enamored of metaphorical indirection that he tried to see everything in the terms of something else. But to-day she had her own thoughts. She sat staring into the fire, her cheeks burned by the leaping heat, and Dick, looking up at her, stopped on an uncompleted line. "You haven't," he said, "heard a word." "Not much of it," said Nan. She looked at him disarmingly. When her eyes were like that, Dick's heart was as water. "I was thinking about Tira." He had to place this. Who was Tira? "Oh," said he, "the Tenney woman. Jack needn't have dragged you into that. It's a dirty country story." "Not dirty," said Nan. "You'd love it if you'd thought of it yourself. You'd write a play about it." Dick frowned. "Well, I didn't think of it," said he, "and if I had, I shouldn't be eating and sleeping it as you and Jack are. Whatever's happening up there, it isn't our hunt. It's hers, the woman's. Or the authorities'. The man ought to be shut up." Nan began telling him how it all was, how they wanted definitely to do the right thing and how Tira herself blocked them. Dick listened, commended the drama of it, and yet found it drama only. "But it's a beastly shame," he commented, "to have this come on Jack just now when he isn't fit." Nan had her sudden hot angers. "Do you mean to tell me," she countered, "you believe that now, now you've lived with him and seen he's exactly what he used to be, only more darling--you believe he's broken, dotty? Heavens! I don't know what you'd call it." Dick did not answer. He scarcely heard. One word only hit him like a shot and drew blood. "Stop that!" he ordered. They faced each other with eyes either angry or full of a tumultuous passion an onlooker would have been puzzled to name. "Stop what?" "Calling him darling. I won't have it." Nan found this truly funny, and broke into a laugh. "Do you know," she said, "how every talk of ours ends? Rookie! It always comes round to him. I call him darling and you won't have it. But you'll have to."