IX

Raven stood looking after him a minute and then began an ostentatious

search for his knife, went to the little pile of brush and saw it--the

steel tip of the handle shining there--and pulled the brush aside to get

it. As he was rising with it in his hand, he saw Tenney turn and look

back at him. He held up the knife and called:

"I've got it."

Tenney, not answering even by a sign, went on over the rise and

disappeared below. Then Raven, after lingering a little to make sure he

did not reappear, turned up the slope and into the path at the left and

so came again to the hut. He unlocked the door and went in. She was

sitting by the fire and the child was on the floor, staring rather

vacuously at his little fingers, as if they interested him, but not

much. The woman was looking at the child, but only in a mechanical sort

of way, as if it were her job to look and she did it without intention

even when the child was safe. But she was also watching the door,

waiting for him; it was in an agony of expectation, and her eyes

questioned him the instant he stepped in.

"Warm enough?" he inquired, as incidentally, he hoped, as if it were not

unusual to find her here. "Let me throw on a log."

He did throw on two and the fire answered. The solemn child, who proved,

at closer view, to have an unusual beauty of pink cheeks, blue eyes, and

reddish hair, did not intermit his serious gaze at his fingers. When

Raven had put on the logs and dusted himself off, he found himself at a

loss. How should he begin? Was Tenney, with his catamount yells and his

axe, to be ignored altogether, or should he reassure her by telling her

the man had gone? But she herself began.

"I suppose," she said, in the eloquent low voice that seemed to make the

smallest word significant, "you think it's funny."

Raven knew what sense the word was meant to convey.

"No," he said, "not in the least. It's pretty bad for you, though," he

added gravely, on second thought that he might.

She made a little gesture with her hand. It was a beautifully formed

hand, but reddened with work. The gesture was as if she threw something

away.

"He won't hurt me," she said.

"No," Raven returned, "I should hope not."

He drew up a chair to the hearth and was about to take it when she spoke

again. The blood ran into her cheeks, as she did it, and she put her

request with difficulty. It seemed to Raven that she was suddenly

engulfed in shame.

"Should you just as soon," she asked, "take the key inside an' lock the

door?"

She put it humbly, and Raven rose at once.

"Of course," he said. "Good idea."

He locked the door and came back to his chair and she began, never

omitting to share her attention with the child:

"I know who you be. It's too bad this has come upon you. I'll have to

ask you not to let it go any further."

Raven was about to assure her that nothing had come upon him, and then

he bethought himself that a great deal had. She had looked to him like

the Mother of Sorrows and, though the shock of that vision was over, she

seemed to him now scarcely less touching in her beautiful maternity and

her undefended state. So he only glanced at her and said gravely:

"Nobody will know anything about it from me. After all"--he was bound to

reassure her if he could--"I've nothing to tell."

Her face flashed into an intensity of revolt against any subterfuge, the

matter was so terrible.

"Why, yes, you have," said she. "Isr'el Tenney chased his woman up into

the woods with an axe. An' you heard him yellin' after her. That's God's

truth."

Raven felt rising in him the rage of the natural man, a passion of

protection for the woman who is invincibly beautiful yet physically

weak.

"An'," she went on, "you might ha' seen him out there, axe an' all."

"Oh," said Raven, as if it were of no great account, "I did see him."

"O my soul!" she breathed. "You see him? I'm glad you come in. He might

ha' asked you if you'd seen me."

"He did."

This was a new terror and she was undone.

"How'd you do it?" she asked breathlessly. "You must ha' put it better'n

I could or he'd be here now."

"I didn't 'put it,'" said Raven, easily. "I lied, and he went off down

the hill."

Extravagant as it seemed, he did get an impression, like a flash, that

she was disappointed in him because he had lied. But this was no time

for casuistry. There were steps to be taken.

"You won't go back to him," he said, and said it definitively as if it

were a matter he had thought out, said it like a command.

She stared at him.

"Not go back to him?" she repeated. "Why, I've got to go back to him.

I've got to go home. Where do you expect I'm goin', if I don't go home?"

"Haven't you any people?" Raven asked her. "Can't you go to them?"

She laughed a little, softly, showing fine white teeth. The spell of her

beauty was moving to him. He might never, he thought, have noticed her

at all in other circumstances, if he had not seen her there in the woods

and felt her need knock at his heart with the imperative summons of the

outraged maternal. Was this the feeling rising in him that had made his

mother's servitude to his father so sickening in those years gone by?

Was the old string still throbbing? Did it need but a woman's hand to

play upon it? And yet must he not have noted her, wherever they had met?

Would not any man?

"I've got four brothers," she said. "They'd laugh at me. They'd tell me

I'd married well an' got a better home than any of them could scrape

together if they begun at the beginnin' an' lived their lives over.

There's nothin' in Isr'el Tenney to be afraid of, they'd tell me. And

there ain't--for them."

"No," said Raven quietly. He felt an intense desire to feel his way,

make no mistakes, run no risk of shutting off her confidence. "It's a

different thing for you."

Now she turned her face more fully upon him, in a challenging surprise.

"Why," she said, "I ain't afraid--except for him."

By the smallest motion of her hand she indicated the child, who was now,

in sudden sleepiness, toppling back against the wall.

"Put him up here," said Raven, indicating the couch.

He opened the folded rug and held it until she had disposed the little

lax figure among the pillows. Then she took the rug from him and covered

the child, with quick, capable movements of her beautiful worn hands.

Raven, watching her, felt a clutch at his throat. Surely there was

nothing in the known world of plastic action so wonderful as these

movements of mothers' hands in their work of easing a child. With a last

quick touch on the rug, drawing it slightly away from the baby cheek,

she returned to her chair, and Raven again took his. He was afraid lest

she repent her open-mindedness toward him and talk no more. But she was

looking at him earnestly. It was evidently a part of her precautionary

foresight that he should know. Did she think he could help her? His

blood quickened at the thought. It seemed enough to have lived for, in

so brutal a world. She veered for a moment from her terror to the

necessity for justifying herself.

"You needn't think," she said, almost aggressively, "I'd talk to

everybody like this."

He was holding himself down to a moderation he knew she wanted, and

replied:

"No, of course not. But you can talk to me."

"Yes," she said, "I can." She dismissed that, having said it, as if she

saw no need of finding the underlying reasons they were both going by.

"You see," she said, "it's the baby. When he gits one o' them spells,

it's the baby he pitches on."

Raven picked out from her confusion of pronouns the fact that Tenney, in

his spells, incredibly threatened the baby.

"Don't you think," he said, "you make too much of it--I mean, as to the

baby. He wouldn't hurt his own child."

Again the blood ran into her cheeks, and she looked a suffering so acute

that Raven got up and walked through the room to the window. It seemed

an indecency to scan the anguished page of her face.

"That's it," she said, in a strangled voice. "When he has his spells he

don't believe the baby's his."

"God!" muttered Raven. He turned and came back to her. "You don't mean

to live with him," he said. "You can't. You mustn't. The man's a brute."

She was looking up at him proudly.

"But," she said, "baby is his own child."

"Good God! of course it is," broke out Raven, in a fever of impatience.

"Of course it's his child. You don't need to tell me that."

Then, incredibly, she smiled and two dimples appeared at the corners of

her mouth and altered her face from a mask of tragic suffering to the

sweetest playfulness.

"You mustn't say 'it,'" she reproved him. "You must say 'he.' Anybody'd

know you ain't a family man."

Raven stood looking at her a moment, his own smile coming. Then he sat

down in his chair. He wanted to tell her how game she was, and there

seemed no way to manage it. But now he could ask her questions. Her

friendliness, her amazing confidence, had opened the door.

"Exactly what do you mean?" he asked, yet cautiously, for even after her

own avowals he might frighten her off the bough. "Does he drink?"

She looked at him reprovingly.

"No, indeed," she said. "He's a very religious man."

"The devil he is!" Raven found himself muttering, remembering the

catamount yells and the axe. "Then what," he continued, with as complete

an air as he could manage of taking it as all in the day's work, "what

do you mean by his spells?"

She was silent a moment. Her mind seemed to be going back.

"He gits--mad," she said slowly. "Crazy, kind of. It's when he looks at

baby and baby looks different to him."

"Different? How different?"

"Why," she said, in a burst of pride turning for an instant to the

little figure on the couch, "baby's got awful cunnin' little ways. An'

he's got a little way o' lookin' up sideways, kind o' droll, an' when he

does that an' Mr. Tenney sees it"--here Raven glanced at her quickly,

wondering what accounted for her being so scrupulous with her "Mr.

Tenney"--"he can't help noticin' it an' he can't help thinkin' how baby

ain't colored like either of us--we're both dark----"

There she stopped, at last in irreparable confusion, and Raven was

relieved. How could he let her, he had been thinking, go on with the

sordid revelation? When he spoke, it was more to himself than to her,

but conclusively:

"The man's a beast."

"No, he ain't," said she indignantly. "Baby's light complected. You see

he is. An' I'm dark an' so's Mr. Tenney. An' I told him--I told him

about me before we were married, an' he thought he could stand it then.

But we went over to the county fair an' he see--_him_. He come up an'

spoke to him, that man did, spoke to us both, an' Mr. Tenney looked at

him as if he never meant to forgit him, an' he ain't forgot him, not a

minute since. He's light complected, blue eyes an' all. An' he stood

there, that man did, talkin' to us, kinder laughin' an' bein' funny, an'

all to scare me out o' my life for fear o' what he'd say. He didn't say

a word he hadn't ought to, an' when he'd had his joke he walked off. But

he had just that way o' lookin' up kinder droll, an' baby's got it. Mr.

Raven, for God's sake tell me why my baby's got to look like that man?"

She was shaking him into a passion as unendurable as her own. He had

never felt such pity for any human being, not even the men blinded and

broken in the War. And he understood her now. Even through his belief in

her, that sudden belief born of her beauty and her extremity, he had

been amazed at her accepting him so absolutely. Now he saw. He was her

last hope and perhaps because he was different from the neighbors to

whom she could not speak, she was throwing herself into the arms of his

compassion. And she had to hurry lest she might not see him again. He

sat there, his hands clenched between his knees, his head bent. He must

not look at her.

"Poor chap!" he said finally, his altered thoughts now on Tenney. "He's

jealous."

She broke into a sob that seemed to rend her and then pulled herself up

and sat silent. But he could see, from her shadowy outline through his

oblique vision, that she was shaking horribly.

"Can't you," he said, "make him understand, make him see how--how

tremendously you love him?"

That was pretty mawkish, he thought, as he said it, but he meant it, he

meant volumes more. Flood the man with kindness, open the doors of her

beauty and let him see how really incorruptible she was, how loyal, how

wronged. For, with every minute of her company, he was the more

convinced of her inviolate self. Whatever the self had been through, now

it was motherhood incarnate. What was she saying to this last?

"Be nice to him?" she asked, "that kind o' way?" And he saw, as she did,

that he had meant her to drown the man's jealous passion in passion of

her own. "He thinks," she said bitterly, "that's the kind o' woman I

am."

Then he looked with her upon the barricaded road of her endeavor.

"I can't even," she said, "have the house pretty when he comes home an'

be dressed up so's he'll have a pleasant evenin' but he thinks--that's

the kind o' woman I am." The last she said as if she had said it many

times before and it held the concentrated bitterness of her hateful

life. "An'," she added, turning upon him and speaking fiercely, as if he

had been the one to accuse her, "it's true. It is the kind o' woman I

am. An' I don't want to be. I want to set down with my sewin' an' watch

the baby playin' round. What is it about me? What makes 'em foller me

an' offer me things an' try, one way or another, to bring me down? What

is it?"

She was panting with the passion of what seemed an accusation of him

with all mankind. He added one more to his list of indictments against

nature as God had made it. Here she was, a lure, innocent, he could have

sworn, backed up against the defenses of her ignorance, and the whole

machinery of nature was moving upon her, seeking, with its multitudinous

hands, to pull her in and utilize her for its own ends.

"Never mind," he said harshly. "Don't try to understand things. You

can't. We can't any of us. Only I'll tell you how you looked to me, that

first minute. You looked like the Virgin Mary, Mother of Christ."

She shrank a little. He had touched, he saw, innocent prejudices.

"Are you a Roman Catholic?" she asked.

"No," he said, "not that nor anything. But you see how good you looked

to me. It doesn't hurt any of us to be Catholic, if we're good."

"I didn't mean anything," she said humbly. "Only there ain't many round

here."

"You say your husband is religious. Does he go to church?"

"Yes," she answered soberly, and also with a kind of wonder at a man's

accomplishing so dull an observance. "We go twice every Sunday, an'

Sunday school an' evenin' meetin' besides."

"Do you like it?"

"No," she said, looking rueful, as if trusting he might forgive her. "I

git sleepy."

At this Raven laughed and she glanced at him mildly, as if wandering

what he had found to please him. He had been thinking.

"Now," he said, "we must plan what you're going to do. You won't let me

send you and the baby away to stay awhile?"

She shook her head.

"Then what are we going to do? Can't you let me go to him and tell him,

man to man, what an infernal fool he is?"

A wild alarm flew into her face.

"No! no!" she said.

"What is going to happen? You can't go home."

"Oh, yes, I can," said she. "I always do. It works off. Maybe it's

worked off now. He gits all wore out actin' the way he does, an' then

he's terrible scared for fear I've made way with myself, an' he's all

bowed down."

"Oh!" said Raven. "And you've got him where you want him. And you settle

down and wait for another spell. How long do you generally stay away?"

"Long's I can," she answered simply. "Till I'm afraid baby'll git cold.

I keep his little things where I can ketch 'em up an' run. But sometimes

he 'most gits a chill."

The yearning of anxiety in her voice was intense enough, he thought, to

balance the grief of all the mothers bereft by Herod.

"I don't see," he said, "how you get up here anyway. You must come by

the road? Why doesn't he follow you?"

The slow red surged into her face. She was hesitating. There was

evidently worse to come.

"He gits so mad," she said, with frequent pauses between the words, "he

don't stay in the house after he's had a spell. I guess he don't dare

to. He's afraid of what he'll do. He goes out an' smashes away at the

woodpile or suthin.' An' it's then I ketch up the baby an' run. I go out

the side door an' up the road a piece an' into the back road. Then I

come down the loggin' road the back way an' end up here. It's God's

mercy," she said passionately, "they've broke out that loggin' road or

there wouldn't be any path an' he'd see my tracks in the snow."

"Then," said Raven, "if he has sense enough to go and work it off on the

woodpile, perhaps you aren't in any real danger, after all."

She looked at him piteously. Her eyes narrowed with a frowning return to

a scene of terror past and persistently avoided in retrospect.

"'Most always," she said, in a low tone, "it comes on him ag'in, an'

then, 'fore you know it, he's back in the house. Once he brought the axe

with him. Baby was in the cradle. The cradle head's split right square

acrost."

"Good God!" said Raven. "And you won't let me send you away from here?"

"Why, Mr. Raven," said she, and her voice was only less exquisite in its

tenderness than when she spoke of the baby, "ain't I married to him?"

They sat looking at each other, and the suffused beauty of her face was

so moving to him that he got up and went to the window and stared out at

the tree branches in their winter calm. He made himself stand there

looking at them and thinking persistently of them, not of her. She would

not bear thinking of, this thing of beauty and need and, at the same

time, inexorability of endurance. Unless she would let him help her, he

was only driving the hot ploughshare of her misery through his own heart

for nothing. So he stood there, mechanically studying the trees and

remembering how they would wake from this frozen calm on a night when

the north wind got at them and made them thrash at one another in the

fury of their destiny. Her voice recalled him.

"I don't mean," she said, "to make you feel bad. I hadn't ought to put

it on anybody else's shoulders, anyway."

Then Raven realized that the tenderness in her voice was for him. He

turned and came back to his place by the fire. But he did not sit. He

stood looking at her as she looked anxiously up at him.

"I'll tell you what we'll do," he said, "for the present, anyway. I'm

going now, and you're to stay here as long as you think best. When you

go, lock the door and put the key under the flat stone out by the step.

I often leave the key there. I'll make sure the stone isn't frozen down.

Now, you understand, don't you? You're to come up here whenever you

like. If there isn't a fire, you're to build one. Nobody will disturb

you. Jerry won't be cutting up here. I'll send him down into the lower

woods."

"But," she said, in evident concern, "I can't do that. You come up here

to write your books. Mr. Tenney said so, when he was tellin' me who all

the neighbors were. He said you had the shack repaired so's to write

your books."

Raven smiled. Books seemed far removed from this naked face of life.

"I'm not writing books now," he said. "I'm just hanging round. I may go

over and see your husband, ask him to do some work for me."

The quick look of alarm ran into her face.

"Oh," she breathed, "you won't----"

"No," he answered steadily, "I won't say a word about you. Of course I

sha'n't. And I won't to anybody."

"An'," she broke in tumultuously, "if you should see me--oh, it's an

awful thing to say, after what you've done for me this day--but you

won't act as if you ever see me before?"

That was the only wisdom, Raven saw, but a band seemed to tighten about

his heart. Deny her before men, she whom he had not yet untangled from

the rapt vision of their meeting?

"No," he said, "I won't even look at you. Now I'm going. I'll loosen up

the stone."

She rose to her imposing height and came to him where he stood, his hand

on the latch. Her eyes brimmed. In the one glance he had of her, he

thought such extremity of gratitude might, in another instant, break in

a flood of words.

"Go back," he said, "where nobody can see you when I open the door.

Jerry may have taken a notion to come up."

She turned obediently and he did not look at her again. He opened the

door and stepped out. The stone was there beside the larger one below

the sill. He bent and wrenched it up from the ground where the frost was

holding it, and with such unregarding force that the edges hurt his

hands. He smiled a little at the savage satisfaction of the act,

wondering if this was how Tenney felt when he smashed away at the wood.

Then he remembered that the key was inside, tapped on the door, opened

it and spoke to her:

"You'd better lock the door. Keep it locked till you go."

She was sitting before the fire, her head bent almost to her knee, her

face in her hands. He closed the door and waited until he heard her step

and the turning of the key. Then he strode out into the logging road and

down the slope. One certainty surged and trembled in him: that he had

never been so sorry for anybody in his life.

X

Raven, determinedly shedding his emotion, plunged fast down the hill and

into the house where Charlotte was busy in a steam of fragrances from

stove and cooking table and Jerry sat smoothing an axe helve.

"See here," said Raven, pulling off his gloves and advancing to the

stove, where Jerry, looking mildly up, made room for him, "are you

thinning out up on the ridge?"

Jerry nodded.

"That's what you wrote," said he.

"I've changed my mind," said Raven. "It looks mighty well up there as it

is, for the present, anyway. Didn't you say there was a lot of gray

birch that needed to go down in the river pasture?"

Again Jerry nodded, and Charlotte, evidently not finding this definite

enough, put in:

"Why, yes, Jerry, seems to me you said so. 'Twas in that letter you had

me write."

"Well," said Raven, "I want you to get at the river woods. I want 'em

cleaned up. Couldn't you get somebody to help you? That man Tenney, how

about him?"

Jerry, confronted by haste and emergency, two flying visitants he never

could encounter adequately, opened his mouth and looked at Charlotte.

"Why, yes," said she. "He's a great hand to work. You said so yourself,

Jerry, only last week."

"Then what if we should hire him?" said Raven. "What if I should go up

and ask him now?"

Jerry was slowly coming to.

"He's been by here to-day," said he, "axe in his hand. Went as if he's

sent for. Then he went back."

"Well, that was an hour or more ago," said Charlotte. "You says to me,

'Where's he be'n?' says you. Yes, he's got home long 'fore this. You'll

find him some'r's round home."

"All right," said Raven. "Don't go up on the ridge again, Jerry. I want

it left as it is."

He hurried out through the shed and Charlotte and Jerry exchanged

glances, his entirely bemused and she sympathetically tender.

"'Course he don't want you cuttin' on the ridge," she said. "He's goin'

up there to write his books. I should think you could see that."

For Charlotte, when no third person was by to observe Jerry's sloth at

the uptake, had methods of her own to keep him mentally alive. If he did

lag a pace behind, it was his secret and hers, and sometimes, between

themselves, it was wholesome to recognize it.

Raven walked at top speed. He could not, at his utmost, get to Tenney

soon enough. It was true, he was under vow not to assault or accuse him,

but it seemed to him the woman would not be even intermittently safe

unless the man were under his eye. As the picture of her flashed again

to his mind, sitting by his hearth, her head bowed in grief unspeakable,

he wondered what he should call her. Surely not, in his rage against

Tenney, by Tenney's name. She was "the woman," she was the pitiful type

of all suffering womanhood.

There was the house, rather narrow in build, but painted white, with

green blinds. The narrowness gave it a look of unwelcoming meagerness,

this although it was of a good size. Raven wondered why some minds ran

to pointed roofs, inhospitable to the eye. This looked to him like

Tenney, his idea of him. The barn was spacious, and beautiful in silver

gray, and the woodpile, Raven decided ironically, a marvel of artistic

skill. He had never seen such a big woodpile, so accurately trimmed at

the corners, so perfect in the face of an extended length. It must, he

judged, represent a good many hours of jealous madness, if it was

entirely the product of those outbreaks when Tenney went out to smash

wood. And there, round one corner of the pile, was Tenney himself. Raven

realized that he had not expected to find him. Actually he had believed

the man was raging over snowy hillsides somewhere about, armed with his

axe and uttering those catamount cries. Tenney was not at work. He was

standing perfectly still, looking up the road.

"Hullo!" called Raven, turning into the yard, and the man jerked back a

step and then stopped and awaited him.

It was not a step actually. His feet did not leave the ground. He

merely, his whole body, seemed thrown out of position, to recover

instantly. Raven, watching him as he traversed the few steps between

them, decided that he was uncontrollably nervous, frightened, too,

perhaps, at what his apprehensive mind pictured: and that was good for

him. What was Tenney, according to his look? Raven, scrutinizing him as

he approached, determined to know something more than he had caught from

those preoccupied minutes in the woods. How, if he had his pen in hand,

would he describe Israel Tenney for one of the folk tales Anne had so

persistently urged him to? A thin, tall man with narrow shoulders and

yet somehow giving an impression of great wiry strength. He had a boldly

drawn line of profile, hair black and glossy and, as Raven saw with

distaste, rather long under his hat, vertical lines marking his cheeks,

lines deeper than seemed justified by his age, and, as he had noted

before, his eyes were also black with a spark in them. What was the

spark? It was, Raven concluded again, in this quick scrutiny, like that

in the eyes of inventors and visionaries. He wore clothes so threadbare

that it seemed as if he must have been cold. But they were patched with

a scrupulous nicety that made some revulsion in Raven rise up and

dramatically spur him to a new resentment. She had patched them. Her

faithful needle had spent its art on this murderer of her peace. He had

reached the woodpile now and Tenney came a step forward.

"Great woodpile you've got here," said Raven.

Tenney put out his hand and rested it on one of the sticks. He might

have been caressing a pet dog.

"Stove wood length," he said briefly. Then he seemed to feel some

curiosity over being sought out after their meeting on the rise and

asked: "D'you find your knife?"

"Why, yes," said Raven. "Didn't you see me hold it up to you?"

Tenney nodded, frowning. He seemed to conclude he was giving himself

away, showing more interest in the stranger than the stranger had in any

way earned. But he asked another question. It leaped from him. He had to

ask it.

"D'you see anybody up round there after I come down?"

Raven shook his head, looking, he hoped, vague.

"I came down myself," he said. "I had to talk with Jerry about his

thinning out."

The eagerness faded from Tenney's face.

"I didn't see Jerry up there this mornin'," he volunteered, in an

indifferent contribution toward the talk.

"No," said Raven. "You won't see him up there at all after this--for a

spell, that is. I write, you know, books. I like to go up to the hut to

work. Not so likely to be interrupted there. I don't want chopping going

on."

Tenney, with a quick lift of the head, looked at him questioningly.

Raven saw anger also in the look, at last anger ready to spring. Both

men had the same thought. Tenney wondered if the owner of the wood was

going to taunt him again with yelling like a catamount, and Raven did

actually put aside an impulse toward it.

"D'you come over here to forbid my goin' up in your woods?" Tenney

inquired.

"No," said Raven. "I came to ask you if you could help Jerry do some

thinning out in the river pasture. I'm rather in a hurry about that."

"Why, yes," Tenney began. Then he added breathlessly, as if another part

of his mind (the suffering, uncontrolled part) broke in on his speech:

"Not yet, though. I can't do anything yet, not till I see how things

turn."

Raven thought he understood. Tenney could settle to nothing until he

knew when his wife was coming back or whether she was coming at all. Now

that the vision of her had entered on their stage, he was conscious of

answering coldly:

"All right. You can make up your mind and go over and see Jerry. He'll

arrange it with you."

On these words, he was about turning away, when he found Tenney suddenly

oblivious of him. The man's thin face was quivering into a pathetic

disorder, flushed, quite beyond his control. He neither heard Raven nor

saw him, though he did speak brokenly:

"There!" he said. "There she is now."

Raven, turning, followed his gaze, directed up the road, not the way he

had come. There she was, walking toward them with swift, long steps, the

child held with the firmness that still seemed a careless buoyancy, as

he had seen her in the woods. She had come home, as she went, the back

way. Raven could have stood there through the long minute, motionless,

waiting for her to come to him, for it seemed as if it were to him she

came, not Tenney. But he recalled himself with a brusqueness so rough

and sudden that it was as if he gave himself a blow. That last glance

had shown him she had nothing more to fear from Tenney, for this time at

least. The man had been horribly frightened at her going. Now he was

under her heel. Raven did not give her another look. He turned homeward,

and called back to Tenney loudly enough for her to overhear him and be

under no apprehension as to what had passed:

"Make up your mind, then come and talk it over with Jerry. It's

chopping, you understand, gray birches down in the river pasture."

Tenney did not answer, and Raven, striding along the road, listened with

all possible intentness to hear whether husband and wife spoke together.

He thought not, but he did hear the closing of a door.