* * * * * Ben noticed that Reuben was making less snickering circumstance than usual of diving under the covers in the chill of the garret. Both had wriggled into dark security before Ben remembered that Ru had not said prayers at all--for him almost unprecedented--nor had Ben himself done so. Uneasily Ben decided to let it go this once. Reuben had lapsed into heavy stillness and would certainly resent a jab in the back. As for himself, he could pray silently in bed: Father and Mother both said so. So far as Ben knew, Reuben was sleeping as well as ever these nights, starting dutifully on his own side buried to the nose, but later twitching in sleep, flinging himself about--frequently plagued, Ben knew, by terrifying dreams. Often, when he was well down in sleep, his arm would arrive on Ben's chest with a hard impatient flop; then, usually, quiet. Ben could not remove the arm without waking him, which might bring on an hour's talking-spell. Ben enjoyed those, but on these February nights Ben wanted to sleep, and an unfamiliar difficulty in it was annoying him like a sore tooth. Was he a coward, that he should die a little whenever some obscure night noise resembled distant shouts or gunfire? What was bravery anyway, and why could you never be certain you possessed it? Had he stumbled into sin without knowing it? He could uncover no kernel of serious iniquity. All winter he had been rigidly good, because (Father said, Mother said) his brother looked up to him and needed the example of virtue. Yet they ought to know--Mother surely did--that Reuben was the nearer to grace. No angel of course. Ru's normally loving temper could be submerged in sullen withdrawal or red-faced wrath. The brothers had quarreled a few times; only a few, since for Ben the experience was too shattering, turning the natural world upside down in loss and destruction. Nowadays Ben thought he knew how to read the danger signs and head off an explosion. It could not be sin that held him wakeful. More likely fear--listening for the town watch to become a voice instead of a crunch of boots. Ben had fallen into the habit of noting that squeak of leather on snow, then straying into some waking dream in which a stern Ben Cory with a thinner mouth played a heroic part or died interestingly.