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Maballa was her name, Rookie had told him, and she understood and could talk English better than her son. Billy told her of the condition in the cabin, and when he had finished she took a small pack from the sledge, cackled a few words to Indian Joe, and followed him without a moment's hesitation. That she had no fear of the plague added to Billy's feeling of relief.

The game was that she and Rookie were living here in this house in some such potency of possessive bliss that nothing could separate them. She was careless over the terms of it. She was a child, she was a woman, she was everything Rookie wanted her to be.

Rookie was sensitive to see, and she found her hand steady to hold the torch. But there she saw herself slipping into Aunt Anne's mandatory attitude, choking, dominating, sapping him, heart and brain. It mustn't be done. It shouldn't. Rookie had had enough of spiritual government.

He got up and stood looking down at her in a dignity she found new to him. "When you come to me," he said, "you'll come because I ask you. It won't be because any other man tells you to." He walked past her, out of the room. Did he, Nan wondered, in her ingenuous surprise, look a very little like Rookie? When he was twenty years older, was he going to look as Rookie did now?

"I told my mother." "Yes, you told your mother. And she comes up here with her alienists." "You'll notice," said Dick icily, "the alienist didn't come." "I assume," said Nan, "he's expected on the next train. Or he's going to pounce some time when Rookie isn't prepared." "You little beast!" said Dick. "You don't deserve it, but I'll inform you he isn't coming at all. I choked him off.

"It's no matter whether I like it or not," said Nan, in a chilly way he interpreted as pride. "I'm in it. And I'm going to play the game." They went on for a while without speaking, and then Raven looked round at her, a whimsical look. "So you give notice," he said, "you're grown up." "I give notice," said Nan tersely. "I'm a very old lady really, older than you are, Rookie."

So queer, Rookie, like all the things that keep happening to us. Little ironies, you know, that sort of thing. For she thought I was behaving shockingly toward God. And really, Rookie, it was because I was so afraid of Him. I believed in Him so much I couldn't say I believed in a way I didn't." "Like Old Crow," said Raven. "Only you didn't go far enough. You didn't say it's only a symbol."

"Yes," said Nan, coming up with him. "No go, Rookie. He was civil. But he was dreadful. I don't know whether I should have known it, but it's the way she looked at him. Rookie, she was scared blue." Raven said nothing. He felt a poor stick indeed, to have brought Nan into it and given her over to defeat. "Can't we walk a spell?" said she. "Couldn't we take the back road to the hut?

"What is it, Rookie?" she asked, coming forward to him. "I'm funny, I suppose, but not so funny as all that. What's the joke?" She was a finished sort of creature to come into his wood solitude, and yet an outdoor creature, too, with her gray fur cap and coat.

Only she can't do it the way we've offered her, because now you've come into it." "I've been in it from the first," frowned Raven. "Ever since the day I found her up there in the woods." "Yes, but then that poor crazy idiot was jealous only of him, the creature that sat down by her at prayer-meeting; and now he's jealous of you. And she's saving you, Rookie. At any risk. Even her own child."