"And I made up my mind," he said, with the same simplicity of hanging to the fact and finding no necessity for explaining it, "to get hold of Anne, put it to her, let her see I meant to be square about it, but it had got to be as I saw it and not as she did. Really because I'm here and she isn't." Her eyes filled with tears, and as she made no effort to restrain them, they ran over and spilled in her lap. She had thought hard for him, but never so simply, so sternly as this. "How do you mean, Rookie," she asked humbly, in some doubt as to her understanding. "How can you get hold of Aunt Anne?" "I don't know," said he. "But I've got to. I may not be able to get at her, but she must be able to get at me. She's got to. She's got to listen and understand I'm doing my best for her and what she wants. Old Crow understands me. And when Anne does--why, then I shall feel free." And while he implied it was freedom from the tyranny of the bequest, she knew it implied, too, a continued freedom from Aunt Anne. Would he ever have set his face so fixedly toward that if he had not found Tira? And what was Tira's silent call to him? Was it of the blood only, because she was one of those women nature has manacled with the heaviness of the earth's demands? Strangely, she knew, nature acts, sometimes sending a woman child into the world with the seeds of life shut in her baby hand, a wafer for men to taste, a perfume to draw them across mountain and plain. The woman may be dutiful and sound, and then she suffers bewildered anguish from its potency; or she may league herself with the powers of darkness, and then she is a harlot of Babylon or old Rome. And Tira was good. Whether or not Raven heard the call of her womanhood--here Nan drew back as from mysteries not hers to touch--he did feel to the full the extremity of her peril, the pathos of her helplessness, the spell of her beauty. She was as strong as the earth because it was the maternal that spoke in her, and all the forces of nature must guard the maternal, that its purpose may be fulfilled. Tira could not speak the English language with purity, but this was immaterial. She was Tira, and as Tira she had innocently laid on Raven the old, dark magic. Nan was under no illusion as to his present abandonment of Tira's cause. That he seemed to have accepted the ebbing of her peril, that he should speak of it with something approaching indifference, did not mean that he had relaxed his vigilance over her. He was not thinking of her with any disordered warmth of sympathy. But he was thinking. Suddenly she spoke, not knowing what she was going to say, but out of the unconscious part of her: "Rookie, you don't want anything really, do you, except to stand by and give us all a boost when we're down?" Raven considered a moment.