lasting and as lost, and childhood and youth came alive in him and hurt and helped him. Yes, this was home. In a hostile universe there was one spot where he and the past could safely rest. VIII Raven went to sleep thinking simply about the house, while the fire flickered down on the hearth and shadows all about the room flickered with it and then went out. He always loved shadows, their beauties and grotesqueries, and he was unfeignedly glad he had no scientific understanding of them, why they played this way or that and translated the substance that made them so delicately and sometimes with such an adorable foolishness. He liked it better that way, liked to make out of them a game of surprises and pretend they were in good form and doing particularly well, or again far below their highest. And following his childishly enchanting game he began to feel rather abashed over what had brought him here. He was glad to have come. It was the only place for him, disordered as he was, with its wholesome calm, and he wondered further if the state of mind that had become habitual to him was now a state of mind at all. Was it not rather a temporary drop in mental temperature now calming to normal? Hadn't he exaggerated the complication of Anne's bequest? There was a way out of it; there must be, a sane, practical way to satisfy what she wished and what she might be supposed to wish now. He comforted himself with the pious sophistry of an Anne raised on the wind of death above early inconclusions and so, of course, agreeing with him who didn't have to pass the gates of mystery to be so raised. He knew enough, evidently, so that he didn't need to die to know more. His letter to Dick seemed of inconsiderable importance, even the disaster of its reaching Amelia. If she held him up to it, he could laugh it off. Anything could be laughed off. So, the shadows mingling with the inconsequence of his thoughts, he drifted away to sleep, catching himself back, now and then, to luxuriate in the assurance that he was in the right place, finding comfortable assuagements, and that inexplicably, because so suddenly, everything was for the best in a mysterious but probably entirely unaccountable world.