The mortification of it all, the despite of not holding his own with her now he was not serving a cause, was plainly evident in Dick's face. He had had a bad night of it, after Nan's flouting and Uncle Jack's letter on top of that. "She was beastly," he said, with no further elaboration. But Raven knew he was returning to his walk home with her and some disconcerting circumstances of it. No doubt Nan had been ruthless. Her mind had been on Aunt Anne and the Palace of Peace. Little boys in love couldn't joggle her fighting arm and expect to escape irritated reproof. "Nan's got a good deal to think of just now," he said. "Besides, you may not be man enough for her yet. Nan's very much of a woman. She'll expect things." Dick sat glowering. "I'm as much of a man as I was in France," he said obstinately. "More. I'm older." Then his sacrificial manner came back, and, remembering what he was there for, he resumed, all humble sweetness, like the little Dick who used to climb on Raven's knee and ask for a tell-story: "I'm going down with you. I've made all my plans." Raven looked up at him in a new surprise. "The deuce you are," said he. "No, you're not, boy. If I catch you down there I'll play the game as you've mapped it out for me. I'll grab Jerry's axe or pitchfork and run amuck, blest if I don't. You'll wake up and find yourself sending for the doctor." Glancing cheerfully up, he was instantly aware, from the boy's unhappy face, that Dick believed him. Raven burst into a laugh, but he quickly sobered. What a snare they were getting themselves into, and only by an impish destiny of haphazard speech. "Don't look so shocked, Dickie," he said flippantly. "I'm no more dotty than--Hamlet." There he stopped again to wonder whimsically at the ill fate of it all. For Hamlet was mad; at least, Dick thought so. He couldn't have caught at anything more injurious to his cause. "'They fool me to the top of my bent,'" he reflected ruefully. That was what Dick was ready to do. But sister Amelia wouldn't fool him, if she got East with her emergency dressing bag and her perfectly equipped energy. She would clap him into the Psychopathic before he had time for even half as much blank verse as Hamlet had. They wouldn't allow him a first act. "Don't look like that," he suggested again and kindly, because it was evident that, however irritating Dick might be as a prospective guardian, he was actually suffering an honest misery. "I don't," said Dick. "I mean, I don't mean to look different. But somehow it's got me, this whole business has, and I can't get away from it. I've thought of it every minute since you told me. It isn't so much you I'm thinking about. It's him." Raven, as a writer of English, paused to make a mental note that, in cases of extreme emotion, the nominative case, after the verb to be, is practically no good. You simply have to scrap it. "Who?" he inquired, in the same line of natural language. "Old Crow."