This was why Raven, in Wake Hill, on the morning the letter came to Nan in Boston, got a telegram from her, saying: "Come back." He had gone there to stay over a night, after a few hours' visit with Tenney, who was eagerly glad to see him, and again begging to be confirmed in his condition of spiritual whiteness. Raven had just got to his house when the message was telephoned up from the station, and its urgency made him horribly anxious. He had been especially aware of Nan all day. Little threads of feeling between them had been thrilling to messages he couldn't quite get, as if they were whispers purposely mysterious, to scare a man. He was on edge with them. They quickened the apprehension the message brought upon him overwhelmingly. She never would have summoned him like that if she hadn't needed him, not a word by telephone, but his actual presence. He had Jerry take him back again to the station, and in the late afternoon he walked in on Nan waiting for him in one of the rooms Anne Hamilton had kept faithful to the traditions of bygone Hamiltons, but that now knew her no more. It was Nan the room knew, Nan in her dull blue dress against the background of pink roses she made for herself and the room, Nan white with the pallor of extreme emotion, bright anxiety in her eyes and a tremor about her mouth. She went to him at once, not as the schoolgirl had run, the last time she offered her child lips to him, but as if the moment were a strange moment, a dazzling peak of a moment to be approached--how should she know the way to her heart's desire? "What is it, dear?" asked Raven, not putting her off, as he had the schoolgirl, but only unspeakably thankful for the bare fact of having found her safe. "What's happened?" "I had to tell you straight off," said Nan, "or I couldn't do it at all. He sent me your letter--Dick. The one about me." Raven was conscious of thinking clearly of two things at once. He was, in the first place, aware of the live atoms which were the letter, arranging themselves in his mind, telling him what they had told Nan. He was also absently aware that Nan's face was so near his eyes it was nothing but a blur of white, and that when he bent to it, the white ran, in a rush, into a blur of pink. "So Dick sent it to you," he said. "Well, God bless him for it. Kiss me, my Nan." * * * * * By Alice Brown The Prisoner My Love and I One Act Plays The Black Drop Vanishing Points Robin Hood's Barn Children of Earth Homespun and Gold The Flying Teuton The Road To Castaly Louise Imogen Guiney Bromley Neighborhood The Secret of the Clan The Wind Between the Worlds P/