"Well," said Raven curtly, cracking his voice at him in a way Dick had never had to take from him, "how is it I'm paying? What's the matter with me?" "Why," said Dick, in a perfect innocence of any offense in it, "don't you know? You've seen enough of it. I should think you'd be the first to know." Raven simply looked at him. Dick had a feeling that his uncle was about to roar out something, and braced himself for the unbelievable event. However, it would not surprise him. That, he knew, was a part of it. But Raven was putting his question again, smoothly and tolerantly, as if to assure him there was time enough to make a well considered reply: "Just what, in your opinion, is the matter with me?" "Why," said Dick, that innocent gaze still upon him, "shell shock." Raven jumped. Every nerve in him seemed to give a little twitch of pure surprise with every other. "O Lord!" said he. "Who could ever have expected that? It's worse than I thought." "Why, it's no disgrace," Dick assured him eagerly. "Think how many fellows have had it. They haven't got over it. They're having it now. The only thing to do is to recognize it and put yourself under treatment." "That'll do," said Raven, with a determined calm. "Your diagnosis has gone far enough. And now I shall have to ask you to do two things for me." "Two!" Dick echoed, and Raven, though at the end of his patience, was touched to see the suffused look of the boy's eyes. "You needn't cut it down to two. Just you tell me----" There, though he was poetically eloquent and diffuse in print, he stopped and could literally say no more without an emotion he considered unworthy of him. "Two things," said Raven. "One is to forget every blamed word of the screed I was jackass enough to send you. The other is to give me your word you won't mention it, even to me. Oh, there's another thing. Go home and burn the thing up." Dick's eyes were all a wild apprehension. "Oh," said he, "I can't burn it. I haven't got it." "You haven't it? Who has?" "Nobody--not yet." "Oh, then you've destroyed it already." "No," said Dick miserably. "I've sent it off." "Who to? Nan?" "No. Mother." Raven could hardly believe him. He did not remember any illuminating confidences from Dick on the subject of mother, but he made no doubt the boy looked upon her as he did, as a force too eccentrically irresponsible to be unloosed. "Well!" he said. The state of things struck him as too bad to be taken otherwise than calmly. You couldn't spend on it the amount of emotion it deserved, so you might as well get the credit with yourself and your antagonist of an attack unexpectedly gentle. "Now, what did you think you were doing when you sent it off to your mother?" "Uncle Jack," said Dick, rather awkwardly blundering about his mental armory for some reasonable defense, "she's your sister." "Yes," said Raven, "Milly is my sister. What then?"