"Just what, in your opinion, is the matter with me?"

"Why," said Dick, that innocent gaze still upon him, "shell shock."

Raven jumped. Every nerve in him seemed to give a little twitch of pure surprise with every other.

"O Lord!" said he. "Who could ever have expected that? It's worse than I thought."

"Why, it's no disgrace," Dick assured him eagerly. "Think how many fellows have had it. They haven't got over it. They're having it now. The only thing to do is to recognize it and put yourself under treatment."

"That'll do," said Raven, with a determined calm. "Your diagnosis has gone far enough. And now I shall have to ask you to do two things for me."

"Two!" Dick echoed, and Raven, though at the end of his patience, was touched to see the suffused look of the boy's eyes. "You needn't cut it down to two. Just you tell me——"

There, though he was poetically eloquent and diffuse in print, he stopped and could literally say no more without an emotion he considered unworthy of him.

"Two things," said Raven. "One is to forget every blamed word of the screed I was jackass enough to send you. The other is to give me your word you won't mention it, even to me. Oh, there's another thing. Go home and burn the thing up."

Dick's eyes were all a wild apprehension.

"Oh," said he, "I can't burn it. I haven't got it."

"You haven't it? Who has?"

"Nobody—not yet."

"Oh, then you've destroyed it already."

"No," said Dick miserably. "I've sent it off."

"Who to? Nan?"

"No. Mother."

Raven could hardly believe him. He did not remember any illuminating confidences from Dick on the subject of mother, but he made no doubt the boy looked upon her as he did, as a force too eccentrically irresponsible to be unloosed.

"Well!" he said. The state of things struck him as too bad to be taken otherwise than calmly. You couldn't spend on it the amount of emotion it deserved, so you might as well get the credit with yourself and your antagonist of an attack unexpectedly gentle. "Now, what did you think you were doing when you sent it off to your mother?"

"Uncle Jack," said Dick, rather awkwardly blundering about his mental armory for some reasonable defense, "she's your sister."

"Yes," said Raven, "Milly is my sister. What then?"

"Then, why, then," said Dick, "when a thing like this happens to you, she'd feel it, wouldn't she?"

"You're perfectly sure you know what has happened to me? You trust your own diagnosis?"

"Of course I trust it," Dick burst forth. "Your letter—why, your letter isn't normal. Shell shock's a perfectly legitimate thing. You know it is. You're just the one to be hit. You did perfectly crazy things over there, entirely beyond any man of your years. And I'm mighty thankful we can put our finger on it. For if it isn't shell shock, it's something worse."

"You mean," said Raven, "I've gone off my nut."

Dick did not answer, but there could be no doubt of his own mental excitement, and he was apprehensive in a measure that moved Raven to an amused compassion. Raven sat looking at him a long minute. Then he got up and took his newspaper from the table beside him.

"Come," he said. "We'll go into the library and see if we can get anywhere."

Dick followed him, and they sat down together by the fire, this after Raven had moved a third chair into the space between them. He smiled at himself as he did it. It was the chair Nan had sat in the night before. He had a foolish feeling that he was invoking her remembered presence, calling on her to help them out.

"Now, Dick," he began, when they were seated, "you said something about my letter's not being normal. What is normal, when you come to that?"

Dick frowned into the fire. This, he felt, had some hidden leading, and he wasn't going to be caught.

"What's the use of asking fool questions?" he inquired, in his turn. "You know."

"Can't help it," said Raven. "I've got to be Socratic. Help me out, old man. Let me have my little game. What is normal?"

"Why," said Dick, floundering, "I suppose it's what the general run of people think—and do. It's keeping to the rules. It's trotting on the course. It isn't going off at some tangent of your own."

Dick felt rather proud of this, its fluency and general appositeness. He plucked up his spirits, thinking he might be going to manage Raven, after all.

"Now, see here," said Raven, suddenly leaning forward and looking at him in the friendliest community of feeling, "it means a good deal when a fellow of my years, as you say, gets a biff that sends him staggering."

"Just what I said," Dick assured him. "It's mighty serious. It's awful."

"Has it occurred to you," said Raven, "that I may be right?"

"Right? How right?"

Thereupon question and answer piled up fast.

"I've indicted the universe, as it were. How can you prove the universe hasn't laid herself open to it? How do you know the indictment of the creature she made and then ground under her heel isn't the very thing she's been waiting for all these millions of years?"

"Oh, come, Jack! the universe hasn't been waiting for you. That's a part of it, don't you see? You've got delusions, delusions of greatness, delusions——"

"Shut up. Don't use your spurious jargon on me. Just answer my questions. How do you know it isn't the healthiest thing that ever happened in this rotten tissue of pretense we call civilization for even one man—just one—to get up and swear at the whole system and swear again that, so far as his little midge's existence goes, he won't subscribe to it? What business have you to call that disease? How do you know it isn't health? How do you know I'm not one of the few normal atoms in the whole blamed carcass?"

Dick felt himself profoundly shocked. He was having to reverse his conclusions. Uncle Jack had stood for a well ordered sanity, conversant with wool and books and mysteriously devoted to Miss Anne Hamilton, whose conventional perfections evidently held within their limit Uncle Jack's highest ideals. Uncle Jack had shown a neat talent with his pen. He had grown middle-aged at an imperceptible and blameless pace, and now he was raging about like a sort of cave man with nothing less than the universe to bound his wild leaps and curvetings.

"But you know, Jack," he remonstrated feebly, "there isn't anything new in saying the nation's going to the dogs. The Britishers say it, we say it——"

"I don't say it," Raven asserted. "We're not going to the dogs. We've gone. We're there. We're the dogs ourselves, and nothing worse could happen to a criminal—from Mars, for example—than to be sent to us. We ought to be the convict colony of the universe."

"Don't," said Dick, with an affectionate sweetness as exasperating as it was moving. "It only excites you. Come on out and have a tramp. We could motor out to——"

"O Lord!" groaned Raven. "Why don't you beguile me up to the Psychopathic?"

Then he was, for the first time, aghast at what he had set going. Dick was looking at him again with that suffused glance of an affection too great to mind disclosing itself in all its pathetic abnegation.

"I couldn't say it myself," he began brokenly. "But you've said it; you see yourself. If you would——"

There he stopped and Raven sat staring at him. He felt as if the words had got inside his body and were somehow draining his heart. When he spoke, his voice sounded hoarse in his own ears.

"Dick, old man," he said, "I'm not—that."

"No! no!" Dick hastened to assure him, and somehow his hand had found Raven's and gripped it. "Only—O good God!" he ended, and got out of his chair and turned his back.

Raven, too, rose.

"Dick," said he quietly, "you go home now. And don't you speak about this to anybody, not to Nan even. You understand."

Dick nodded, still with his back turned, and got out of the room, and Raven thought he must have caught at his hat in the hall, and made one stride for the door. The door banged and Raven was alone.



VI

The next day Nan telephoned Raven that she was taking train for New York for perhaps a week's stay with the Seaburys. These were her nearest relatives, cousins at a remove Raven never really untangled, and of late they had been spending persuasive energy in trying to induce her to live with them. Since she had come home from France and Aunt Anne had died, they were always descending upon her for brief visits in the house where she succeeded Aunt Anne, and liking her so tumultuously, in her grown-up state, that they pelted her with arguments based on her presumable loneliness there and the silliness of carrying on the establishment really as a species of home for superannuated servants. Nan honestly liked the cousins, in a casual way, though it was as inconceivable to her that the Boston house might be given up as it would have been to Aunt Anne. There was, she felt, again in Aunt Anne's way, a certain continuity of things you didn't even think of breaking. Now she was seeking the Seaburys for reasons of her own. They had to be suitably told that Aunt Anne had left her money away from them as from her, and naturally, though ridiculously, to "that Raven she was always making a fool of herself about." They were ruthless of speech within family conclave, though any one of them would have thought more than twice about calling Aunt Anne any sort of fool, in her lifetime, even at a distance safely beyond hearing. Raven was not, if Nan could forestall the possibility, to be assaulted by mounting waves of family animosity.

Raven was glad, for once, to get rid of her, to find she was removing herself from the domestic turmoil he had created. There could not be the triangular discussions inevitable if she and Dick fell upon him at once, nor should he have to bear the warmth of her tumultous sympathy. Dick had evidently told her nothing, and he even gathered that she was going without notice to Dick. Then Raven began a systematic and rapid onslaught on his immediate affairs, to put them in order. Mr. Whitney, Anne's lawyer, who had always seemed to regard him in a disconcerting way as belonging to Anne, or her belonging in some undefined fashion to him, opened out expansively on the provisions of the will. He most sincerely congratulated Raven. Of course it was to have been expected, but——! Raven kept miserably to the proprieties of the moment. He listened with all due reserve, silent on the subject of Anne's letter. That was his affair, he thought, his and Nan's; unless, indeed, it was nobody's affair but Anne Hamilton's, and he was blindly to constitute himself the unreasoning agent of her trust. That must be thought out later. If he undertook it now, piling it on the pack of unsubstantial miseries he was carrying, he would be swamped utterly. He could only drop it into a dark pocket of his mind where an ill-assorted medley of dreads and fear lay waiting—for what? For a future less confusing than this inscrutable present? At least, they could not be even glanced at now. He wrote Charlotte and Jerry, his caretakers on the place at Wake Hill, that he was coming for an indefinite stay. He instructed his housekeeper in Boston that the house was to be kept open; possibly Mr. Richard would be there a good deal. Then he sat down to write his sister. That was the problem: what should he say to her who would presently be receiving his unfortunate screed with some inflammatory introduction from Dick and would—he knew her!—scarcely have finished it before she took steps toward flooding him with epistolary advice and comment. He could see her now at her desk, assembling data of conduct, bodily well-being, and putting it all down in that masterful hand of hers. That settled it. He mustn't write her. He must telegraph and forestall Dick. And he did telegraph her, on the moment, a message of noncommittal brevity:

"Letter Dick sent you is all poppycock. Forget it."

That might, he concluded, yet without hope, keep her from rushing her pen to the rescue, even if it did not prevent her fuming. And as he sat at the library table with a disorder of papers before him, Dick appeared at the door: good boy, full of zeal and pity. He looked so overflowing with honest affection, so eagerly ready to help that Raven exasperatedly loved him for his kind officiousness. Yet he had nothing for him but a gruff:

"Now what do you think you're here for?"

Dick was prepared for repulse, this or any other. He had armed himself against all possible whims and obstinacies, and he wore the air of a carefully adjusted patience.

"Can't I help there?" he inquired, advancing to the table and drawing up a chair. "Couldn't you let me run over those and just tell you what they are?"

"You go to thunder," said Raven, rapidly assorting, clapping into bundles and casting aside. "Yes, you can, too. Take this basket and empty it into the fireplace. Behind the log and smash it down so it won't set the chimney afire. Remember how your grandmother used to keep a scare going all the time for fear of chimneys? I guess I've inherited it. I have to use the formula."

Dick emptied the papers with a grave care foreign to him, as if even so small a service, at such a moment, bore a weightier meaning, and brought the basket back. He sat down and waited in a silence Raven felt more portentously vocal than the loudest outcry.

"Dick!" he said. He stopped work and looked at the youth, an unwilling smile twisting his mouth. He was not sure of its being well to take it humorously; yet it was funny. "Dick, if you've got anything to say, say it. If you haven't, clear out. This is my busy day."

Dick shook his head despairingly and yet obstinately. He wasn't going to leave Uncle Jack to the powers of darkness.

"Just tell me what you're winding things up for?" he ventured. "I ought to know."

"Then don't ask as if you were whispering into the ear of Buddha, or trying not to wake baby," said Raven, tearing a package of letters with a sudden savage haste. They were Anne's letters to him when he was in France, and he had meant to keep them because she would have an ideal of the sacredness they ought to bear, and exasperatingly the suggestion seemed to include a power of imposing itself on him. And if Dick hadn't come in to bait him with irrelevant questions, his perverse inner self excused itself, he might not be defying the ideal and tearing the letters up. As it was, he found them a salutary sacrifice.

"If you mean my going to Wake Hill, yes, I'm going. I've written Charlotte. Or rather I've addressed it to Jerry, she's so careful about his prerogative as a male."

"When?" asked Dick.

"The minute I get some boots and things to go logging in. This house will be open. You can come in and roost if you want to. If you marry Nan"—this was an audacity that occurred to him at the moment. It suddenly seemed to him a blessed comfort to think of Nan in his house—"you can come here and live."

Dick lost his sacrificial air and turned sulky.

"I don't know about Nan," he said. "I never know about her, not since we've come back. She was soft as—as silk over there."

"The maternal," said Raven briefly, tearing one of Anne's letters, with a crack, across the pages. "It was what you needed to keep you going. Not personal, only because you were a sojer boy."

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."

Dick uttered the name in a low and hesitating tone. He seemed to offer it unwillingly. Raven stared at him in a perfect surprise, now uncolored by any expectation he might have had of what was coming.

"Old Crow?" he repeated. "What do you know about Old Crow?"

"Well," said Dick, defensively, "I know as much as you do. That is, I suppose I do. I know as much as all Wake Hill does, anyway."

"Who told you?"

"Mother. I didn't suppose it was any secret."

"No," said Raven thoughtfully, "it's no secret. Only he was queer, he was eccentric, and so I've always assumed he had a pretty bad time of it. That's why I never've talked about him."

"Mother did," said Dick, in a sudden expansion. It seemed to ease him up a little, this leading Raven to the source of his own apprehension. Indeed, he had felt, since Raven's letter, that they must approach the matter of his tired wits with clearness, from the scientific standpoint. The more mental facts and theories they recognized the better. "She told me once you looked just like him, that old daguerreotype."

"Had sister Amelia concluded from that," inquired Raven quietly, "that I was bound to follow Old Crow, live in the woods and go missionarying across the mountain?"

"No," said Dick, so absorbed in his line of argument that he was innocently unaware of any intended irony. "She just happened to speak of it one day when we found the daguerreotype. Uncle Jack, just what do you know about him?"

Raven considered a moment. He was scanning his memory for old impressions and also, in his mild surprise over the pertinency of reviving them, wondering whether he had better pass them on. Or would they knot another tangle in the snarl he and Dick seemed to be, almost without their volition, making?

"Old Crow," he began slowly, "was my great-uncle. His name was John Raven. He was poor, like all the rest of us of that generation and the next, and did the usual things to advance himself, the things in successful men's biographies. He studied by the kitchen fire, not by pine knots, I fancy—that probably was the formula of a time just earlier. Anyhow he fitted himself for the college of the day, for some reason never went, but did go into a lawyer's office instead, was said to have trotted round after a gypsy sort of girl the other side of the mountain, found she was no good, went up into the woods and built the old hut I got into shape in the spring of 1914. Queer! I expected to go up there to study and write. I'd got to the point, I s'pose, where I thought if I had a different place to write in I could write better. Sure sign of waning powers! Well, he lived there by himself, and folks thought he was queer and began to call him Old Crow. I saw him several times when I was a little chap, never alone. Father took me with him when he went up to the hut to carry food. Mother never approved of my going. She disapproved of it so much that father stopped taking me."

"Well, you saw him," said Dick, in a way of holding him to his narrative, so that Raven, wondering why it was of such importance, bent a frowning look on him.

"Yes, I saw him. And he was nice to me, uncommon nice. He put his hand on my shoulder and looked down at me in a way—well, not the patronizing, grown-up way, but as if, now I come to think of it, as if he pitied me."

"How did he look?"

Dick was catching at things, Raven saw, the slightest clue to Old Crow's withdrawn personality. He seemed, on his side, to be constructing a portrait. Raven sought about in the closed chambers of his mind and produced one significant bit of remembrance after another. They were retrieved with difficulty out of the disorder of things regarded as of no importance: but here they were.

"He was tall, thin, rather hatchet-faced, something as I am. Oh, you knew that, didn't you? No beard, and I think he was the neatest person I ever saw. Father was clean shaven, you remember; but there were days when he either got lazy or was too busy to shave. I remember how exquisitely nice and peeled his face used to look on Sunday. But Old Crow was shaved all the time, judging from the way he looked the few times I saw him. I've heard father and mother speak of it, too. Charlotte told me once she'd seen him and he was neat as a new pin."

"How old was he when he went up there into the woods?"

"To live alone? I don't know. Forty, maybe. Comparatively young, anyway."

"Was it the woman? Was there a cause for it, a cause people knew?"

"There wasn't any cause I knew. He simply, so far as I ever heard, passed the place over to father—that was his nephew, you know—and went up the hill and built himself a log hut. It was well built. I only had to calk it some more and put in another flooring when I came into it."

As Raven went on, he became uncomfortably aware of the resemblance between his own proposed withdrawal and Old Crow's; but he stuck to it doggedly. It was all playing into Dick's hands and Amelia's, assuming he could predicate her mind; but he was resolved they shouldn't have it all their own way. He would give them every last straw of evidence, and it should do them no good in the end. There was a bravado about it. If Dick, in his affectionate virtue and Amelia in her energy of well-doing, wanted to challenge him to the proof, he'd give them a pretty tussle for it.

"What I want to know is," said Dick, "what he thought he was going off there for? Didn't anybody know?"

"They may have," said Raven. "I didn't know."

"And he lived his life out there, till he died?"

"Yes. And died in a very gentlemanly fashion, of pneumonia, and was found in a dignified position on his bed, hands folded, and everything in a great state of order, as if he'd known he was going and arranged things to give as little trouble as he could."

"What did he do up there all by himself? Read? Write?"

"He read a good deal, I believe. We found him reading when we went up."

"What sort of books?"

"Oh, hang it, Dick," said Raven, beginning to fidget under examination, "you're district-attorneying it a trifle too much to interest me. I'm getting bored, son. This isn't a third degree."

But Dick was not to be curbed or reasoned with.

"I think," he said, "if you don't mind, we'd better talk it out. You see I do really need to know about him, and you're the only one that can tell me. Mother's is chiefly hearsay."

"Fire away," said Raven easily, accepting the situation. He leaned back in his chair and began making patterns on the block of paper before him with a silver dagger at his hand. "What is it you want to know?"

"Everything. How the neighbors regarded him, what they said."

"The neighbors didn't regard him at all, in your sense. Don't you know the way country folks have of passing over the most eccentric things as if they're all in the day's work? They gossip like thunder, and, if they can whip up a scandal, they're made. But they never seem so awfully shocked. Perhaps it's because they're used to the plain facts of life, death, birth, madness, suicide. Maybe there's a sort of gaucherie about it. There are things you're shocked about that you wouldn't dare discuss at Cambridge or the Club. You'd be afraid it wasn't good form. Maybe you would though, now. Sometimes I forget the world's moved on a peg."

"But what did they say?"

"Can't tell you, Dick. I belong to the family, you know, and maybe they had some decency about talking over Old Crow when I was round. I don't think there was anything they could say. He was a perfectly clean, decent citizen. He kept on voting. He didn't meddle with them and they didn't with him. The only eccentricity about him was that he lived alone and that, the last ten years or so of his life, he tramped all round that region, over the mountain, too, taking care of the sick, if there were any. The last five years he went round preaching, and the very last year of all he took old Billy Jones into his hut, an awful old rip, if ever there was one, and tended him till his death—Billy's death, I mean. And if you consider that as indicating queerness—except that people don't do it—I don't. I should call any conventional disapproval of it an indictment rather, an indictment of Christianity. If it's too eccentric to fit into a so-called Christian civilization, that is."

Dick wasn't going to call it anything at the moment. He sat staring at the table, evidently reflecting, digesting and bowed down by his own gravity in a way that always amused Raven even when he loved the boy most. He fancied, when Dick looked like that, he was brooding over his nose.

"Take it easy, son," he advised him pleasantly. "You won't get anywhere with Old Crow. Guess again."

"No," said Dick, oblivious of the flippancy of this, "we sha'n't get anywhere. We haven't enough data."

"Now," said Raven, coming up from his lounging posture, "I've got to hustle. You run along and we'll go out somewhere to-night: dine, if you want to, and drop in at a show. But, for heaven's sake, don't go to digging up graveyards and expecting me to reconstruct your ancestors from as few bones as we've got of Old Crow's. You bore me sometimes, horribly, Dick. And that's the truth."

Dick did go away, though with an inarticulate remonstrance on his tongue. But Raven was good-natured and yet decided, and even went to the door with him, propelling him by a firm yet affectionate hand on his shoulder.

They did dine out that night in a manner mildly bohemian, really determined upon by Raven to show Dick he wasn't incapable yet of the accepted forms of diversion, afflictingly dull though they might prove.



VII

In less than a week Raven, hurried beyond any design of his own by Dick's anxious attentions, had actually gone. Once in the train on the way into the uplands where Wake Hill lies, he reflected, with a smile, that Dick had really helped him inconceivably in this matter of haste. He might have loitered along, dallying with the wisdom of going, and possibly ended by not going at all. But Dick's insistence on formulating the situation, his neatness and energy in getting all the emotions of the case into their proper pigeon holes, had so harassed and then bored him that he had worked like a beaver, he told himself, to get off and escape them altogether. And not a word from Amelia, either to his telegram or Dick's letter. Things were looking up. It might be Amelia had been elected to some new and absorbing organization for putting the social edifice still more irretrievably into the disorder it seemed bent for, in which case she might forget the inner wobblings of such an inconspicuous nomad as a brother in metaphysical pangs. He became recklessly optimistic, as the train climbed higher into the hills, and luxuriated in it, conscious all the time that it was altitude that was intoxicating him, not any real hope of hoodwinking Amelia. You couldn't do that so easily.

The first glimpse of a far-away mountain brought the surprising tears to his eyes. It was an inconsiderable ridge with an outline of no distinction, but it had the old charm, the power of clutching at his heart and dragging it up from the glories and sorrows of the sea. Raven always insisted that he loved the sea best, with its terrors and multitudinous activities; but the mountains did pull him up somewhere into a region he did not inhabit all the time. He had an idea that this was simply a plane of physical exhilaration; but it didn't matter. It was an easement of a sort, if only the difference of change. When he stepped out of the train at Wake Hill he was in a tranquil frame of mind, and the more the minute he saw Jerry Slate there in the pung, enveloped in the buffalo coat he had worn through the winter months ever since he attained his present height. Jerry was a typical man of Wake Hill. He was ten years, at least, older than Raven and had lived here, man and boy, all his life, and his wife, Charlotte, was the presiding benevolence of the Raven home. Seeing his passenger, he lifted his whip-stock in salute and stepped out of the pung to meet him. Jerry was yellow and freckled and blue-eyed, with a face, Raven always thought, like a baked apple. It had still a rosy bloom, but the puckers overspread it, precisely like an apple's after fervent heat. They shook hands, Jerry having extracted a gnarled member from his mitten.

"You take a look an' see 'f your trunk's come," he recommended, restoring his hand to its beautifully knit sheath. "You're better acquainted with the looks on't than I be. There 'tis now. Anyways it's the only one there."

It was Raven's own, and he and Jerry lifted it into the back of the pung, and were presently jogging temperately homeward. Jerry never had horses with any go in them. In the old days, when Raven used to come to the farm with his mother, he would write Jerry to see that he had a horse.

"Get me a horse," he would write, "a horse, a horse, with four feet and a mane and tail. Not a wooden freak out of Noah's ark, whittled out with a jack-knife, such as I had last year. Get me a horse."

And he would arrive to find some aged specimen, raw-boned and indifferent, waiting for him in the stable. And Jerry would slap the creature's haunches with a fictitious jollity and prophesy, the while he kept an anxious eye on Raven, "I guess he'll suit ye all right."

He never did suit. He had to be swapped off or, as it happened once or twice, given away, and yet Raven was obtuse to the real reason until Charlotte enlightened him. She took him aside, one day in the autumn, when he and his mother were going back to town.

"I guess if you want any horses next spring," she said, with one eye on the door where Jerry might appear, "you better fetch 'em along with you."

"Why, yes," said Raven, "of course I can. Only I had an idea Jerry liked to do the buying for the place."

"Not horses," said Charlotte firmly. "Jerry's a peculiar sort of man. They know it an' they kinder take advantage of him. I dunno why."

Then Raven realized that Charlotte herself was responsible for his faith in Jerry's bargaining prowess. She had hypnotized him into considering Jerry a great fellow at a trade as at everything else manly and invincible. She was watching him now with a doubtful and anxious eye.

"No," she repeated, "I dunno why."

"No," said Raven, "I don't know why either. But I'll look out for it." At that instant he understood her way with Jerry and loved her for it. She was tall and heavy-browed and dark, with warm, brown tints of eyes and skin, and seven times the man Jerry was, but it was her passionate intent to hold him supreme at home and market.

Meantime they were jingling along, with a chill clashing of bells, and Raven had heard all about the prospects of an open winter and the difficulties of ice-cutting, and he gathered that Jerry and Charlotte were extremely pleased to have him come.

"Didn't know's we should ever set eyes on ye ag'in," said Jerry, with an innocuous flick of his whiplash, hitting the dasher by intent. "That War an' all."

Raven thought he detected in his tone a general hostility to the War as a disturber even of Wake Hill, and wondered if he should have to fight it all over again with the imperfectly satisfied ideals of Jerry and Charlotte. But Jerry laid that bogey to rest.

"Not that I wouldn't ha' had ye go," he announced. "I'd ha' gone myself if I hadn't been a leetle mite over age. I dunno but I could ha' been some use as 'twas. I'm spry for my years. I never so much as thought you'd git into it. Charlotte an' I were talkin' it over last night, an' she says, 'He's forty-three, if he's a day.' How old be you?"

"Forty-five," said Raven. "I wasn't in the trenches, you know. Ambulance Corps."

"Sho!" said Jerry. "Never come nigh the fightin' line, I s'pose."

"Sometimes," said Raven, smiling a little to himself. "But the boys in the trenches, you know, they're the ones that did the business. I suppose the Hamilton house was closed all summer?"

Jerry gave him a quick look and then took off a mitten to pass his hand across his mouth. Raven knew what the look meant. It meant Anne Hamilton: how had her death affected him? would he ask about her? and the mild inquisitive neighborhood mind would go back to the old question it had probably dropped and taken up intermittently for years: why, in their curious intimacy, had he never married her?

"Yes," said Jerry, "all summer. Little Nan was over there, too, where you were, I understood."

"Yes, she was over there. She's home now."

"You knew her aunt died?" said Jerry speciously. It was foolish, he knew it was foolish, and yet he could not, in his craving for some amplification of the fact, help saying it.

"Yes," said Raven, "I knew it."

There the topic died. They were passing the last stretch of woods that fringed the road before Raven's own house. Up on that slope at the right, draped about by a dense woodland, occasional patches of pines girdled by birch and maple, was the hut where Old Crow had lived. A logging road came down from the ridge, and Raven saw with interest that it had been broken out.

"Chopping?" he asked, Jerry following his glance to the ascending road.

Jerry grinned and clucked to the horse. He looked well satisfied with himself.

"No," he said. "But the minute you wrote you was comin', I yoked up the oxen an' broke her out. Charlotte said you'd want to be goin' up there."

Raven laughed. It was funny, too grimly funny. Even Charlotte and Jerry were pushing him on up the rise to Old Crow's hut. Dick had begun it and they were adding the impulse of their kindly forethought.

"Yes," he said, "I shall. I'll go up at once." ("And have it over!" his mind cynically added.)

They were descending the last slope and the mild-mannered horse caught the idea of stables and put on a gait. Raven could see the house, delightful to him in its hospitable amplitude and starkly fitting the wintry landscape. There in the columned front porch running away at each side into wide verandas, stood a woman, tall, of proportions that looked, at this first glance, heroic. She wore a shawl about her shoulders, but her head was bare.

"There she is," said Jerry, with an evident pride in so splendid a fact. "I tell her she never can wait a minute to let anybody turn round."

It was true. Charlotte could not wait. She began to wave—no short, staccato, pump-handle wave, but a sweep indicative of breadth, like the horizon line. Raven, while they were jingling up to the house, took one more look at it, recognizing, with a surprise that was almost poignant, how much it meant to him. He might not be glad to get back to it—in his present state of disaffection he could not believe there was a spot on earth he should be glad to see—but it touched the chord of old memories and his eyes were hot with the assault of it. A square house with many additions, so that it rambled comfortably away, threaded over at advantageous points by leafless lines of woodbine and bitter-sweet and murmured over by a great grove of pines at the west: his roots of life were here, he recognized, with a renewed pang of surprise. He was not used to thinking about himself. Now that the changed bias of his mind had bred new habits, he was thinking a great deal.

They stopped at the porch and Charlotte came down to them, stepping lightly yet with deliberation. Raven knew she probably moved slowly because she was so heavy, but it gave the effect of majesty walking. She was unchanged, he thought, as he grasped her firm hand: her smooth brown hair was as thick, her healthy face unlined. When he touched Charlotte he always felt as if he touched the earth itself. Her hand was the hand of earth, ready to lead you to wholesome and satisfying things.

"Well," said she, "if I ain't pleased to see you! Jerry, you goin' to take the trunk in this way?"

Jerry gave her a quick look of inquiry. They had subtle modes of communication. Charlotte could command him by the flicker of an eyelash or a modulation of tone, so that Jerry seemed, in the resultant act, to be following only his own careless or deliberate will.

"Yep," said he, "I'll see to her."

Raven laid hold of it with him and they carried it upstairs to the great front room looking out to the eastern sky. And Raven was again moved, as he went, by another surprising discovery: Charlotte had tears in her eyes. He had at all times a moderate estimate of his own value in the world, his own appeal to it. Perhaps that was one reason, aside from the natural sex revulsion, why Anne's exaggerated fostering had roused in him that wearied perversity. But it was warming to see Charlotte glad enough to cry over him. When they had set down the trunk and the two had gone downstairs, he looked about the room and found it good. The walls were chiefly paneling, all but some expanses of a rich rose and blue paper; the hangings were of a delicious blue, and a roaring fire was making great headway. He could guess Charlotte had timed that birch log, relative to their approach, for the curling bark had not yet blackened and the fat chuckle of it was still insistent. He laughed a little at himself. He might have repudiated the scheme of creation and his own place in it, but he did love things: dear, homespun, familiar things, potent to eke out man's well-being with their own benevolence and make him temporarily content in an inhospitable world.

When he went downstairs, the smells from the kitchen were something overwhelming in their rich pervasiveness. He went directly in where Charlotte bent at the oven door for a frowning inspection and a resultant basting.

"Yes," she said, glancing up, "turkey. Terry set him aside, sort of—he was so well formed and had such nice, pretty ways. Jerry said we'd have him first time you come. He's always be'n a terrible nice turkey."

Raven had seen his place laid in the dining-room with bravery of damask and old china.

"I'm not going to eat alone," he said. "I couldn't face a whole turkey. You and Jerry come on in and back me up. You set on two more plates."

"Oh, no," said Charlotte, closing the oven door and rising. "I guess I'll give him a minute longer. No. It's real nice of you, but we couldn't. Jerry never would in the world."

"Jerry be hanged!" said Raven. He wandered into the pantry and began helping himself to the celery waiting by the cool window-pane. "Tell him it's all decided. Jerry's got to do what we say."

"If that ain't just like you," said Charlotte, with what seemed a pride in his knowing ways. "Eatin' up the celery an' all, the minute 'fore dinner, too. I wonder you don't pry into the cooky jar."

"I will, now you mention it," said Raven, bending to it where it lurked, with its secretive look, under the lower shelf. He lifted the cover with an involuntary care. He had been there so often when he wanted a handful of cookies and knew, if he clinked the cover, he might hear his father's voice from the dining-room where he sat reading his paper: "What are you doing out there?" The cookies were waiting for him, unchanged, as if there were an everlasting pattern of cookies and you couldn't get away from it: oak-leaf, discreetly specked with caraway. "Hurry up," said he, coming out to Charlotte with his clutch of oak-leaves. "Put on your plate and Jerry's or the turkey'll be done before you know it."

Charlotte glanced round at him, absently took the cookies from his hand, as if he were a child whose greed must be regulated, and laid them in a plate on the table.

"Don't you spoil your appetite," she said, still absently, for her mind was with the turkey. "Well, I'll go an' ask Jerry. I don't believe he'll feel to. Miss Anne——"

Raven was sure he heard the last two words as she made her light way out into the shed in a fictitious search for Jerry. He stood staring after her and wondering. It was inconceivable that Anne, by sheer force of a mind absolutely convinced of its own rightness, should have had such a grip on everybody she came in contact with. It had been Anne's house next door. She had spent her summers in it, and even Charlotte had imbibed through its walls the pronouncements of a social code. Anne was dead, but when Charlotte and Jerry were asked to sit down to turkey with their employer and familiar friend, it was Anne's unforgotten ideal that rose before her, the illuminated copy of the social code in its rigid hand. As he stood, he saw Jerry pulling the pung under a shed at the back of the barn. He knew Charlotte hadn't seen him, didn't intend to take the time to see him, but would presently be back with Jerry's ultimatum. That was her system. She implicitly followed Jerry's command, a command she had already put into his mouth. It was so accepted a part of the household routine that he had ceased to think of it as in the least unusual. She was back again almost at once.

"Jerry says he'd be happy to, to-day," she announced, "so long's as he ain't changed back into his barn clo'es. We'll be kinder company. But after this, he says, we'll begin as usual."

So presently they sat down together to the crackly brown turkey and Raven carved and fought off Charlotte, who rose from her place in a majestic authority which seemed the highest decorum to take the fork and pick out titbits for his plate, and they talked of countryside affairs, but never, Raven was grateful to notice, of his absence or of France. Once Jerry did begin a question relative to "them long range guns," but Charlotte bore him down before Raven could lay hold of the question, even if he had been eager for it.

"Jerry's forbid me to ask you the leastest thing about how 'twas over there," she said smoothly, without a look at Jerry, but a direct intention that was like a swift secret communication between them, a line not even to be tapped. "He says, 'We won't say one word about what Mr. Raven's been through, not if he begins to talk about it himself. He's been through enough,' says he. 'Now le's let him turn his mind to suthin' else.'"

"Yes," said Jerry boldly, "I guess that's pretty nigh what I said—what I'd say now, anyways."

Raven smiled a little inwardly, as he often did at "Mr. Raven." He and Jerry and Charlotte had been neighbors, and he, being younger, was always "young John" to them, and sometimes, in excess of friendliness or exhortation, "Jack." He wondered if it had been the social idealism of Anne that had made them attain the proper title, or if, when the crust of renewed convention broke through, they would, under the stress of common activities, flounder about as they did before he went away, in an intermittent familiarity.

"All the houses shut up," he said, "the summer houses?"

"Yes," said Charlotte, eating her wing delicately, perhaps with a thought of Anne. "City folks all gone. Went early this year, too. Wood's so high now, if they ain't cut their own they don't seem to want to lay in. Jerry says they'd ought to think further ahead."

"Yes," said Jerry, with his mechanical acquiescence, "they'd ought to think further ahead."

"Who's bought the old Frye place?" asked Raven. "Or is it empty?"

"No," said Charlotte, "it ain't empty. I dunno's you remember the Tenneys that used to live over the mountain, what they call Mountain Brook. Kind of a shif'less lot they were. Some of 'em drinked."

"Why, yes," said Raven, "I remember 'em. The boys used to do a lot of trapping. One of 'em—what was his name? Israel, yes, that's it. Israel—he seemed to be of a different stripe. Used to work out. Seemed to want to make something of himself."

"That's him," said Charlotte. "Well, he's bought the Frye place."

"Married?"

"Yes, he married a girl over there, at Mountain Brook. He'd been away years an' years, sence he was a growin' boy, an' he come back, an' seems he had money laid up, an' he bought the Frye farm an' went straight off over to Mountain Brook an' hunted her up an' married her. She used to have folks, but they've all moved away. Seems if he'd had her in mind all the time. Kind o' that way, he is, lays his fires a good while beforehand."

"Nice girl?" Raven inquired.

Charlotte hesitated. Her brown cheek flushed.

"Well," she said, "I never've heard anything ag'inst her, not anything I should be willin' to repeat. You know what they be, there over the mountain. There's the Donnyhills. Good folks, but shif'less! my soul! Though she ain't that."

"Called on her, haven't you?"

"No," said Charlotte. She wore the flush of resentful matronhood. "I was goin' to. I started, one afternoon. An' after I'd knocked, I heard him jawin'. Well! You never heard a man talk so in all your life. I never did, anyways! twittin' her with everything under the sun."

"Nice for you," said Raven, "butting in on a row."

"I didn't butt in," said Charlotte. "I turned round an' come straight home. An' the next day they rode by, as budge as you please, she with the baby in her lap. Baby had on a nice white coat. I didn't go ag'in. I didn't feel to."

Then Raven, seeing that Jerry had regretfully but inevitably laid down his knife and fork, as one who can no more, relinquished the Tenneys, and there was a period of that silence so blessed among intimates, and Charlotte brought in the pudding. And after dinner, while she washed the dishes, Raven sat in the kitchen and smoked a pipe with Jerry and thought intermittently, in the inmost cell of his most secret mind, about the blessed beauties of things. Here they were all about him, inherited treasures of memory, some of them homely and of little value, many of them far less convenient than the appliances of the present day. He even thought he recognized ancient utensils, as Charlotte washed them, the great iron spider where crullers were fried—always with a few cut in hands with straight fat fingers, to suit a boyish fancy—and the colander he had once been found utilizing as a helmet in a play of chivalry. Such smells came out of this kitchen, like no other smells in any house he knew. The outlines of things, the tints of time and use! There was the red door into the buttery, where once, when he was a little boy, he had caught for a few minutes only an enchanting glow from the setting sun. Sunrise and rubies and roses: none of them had ever equaled the western light on the old red paint. Over and over again he had tried to recall the magic, to set the door at the precise angle to catch the level rays, but in vain. It was a moment of beauty, fleeting as the sunset itself, and only to be found in the one permanence that is memory. He remembered it now with a thousand other impressions as 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.

At four o'clock he woke. He had not for a moment last night expected this. Four o'clock had been for months the hour of his tryst with the powers of darkness. They hovered over him then with dull grey wings extended, from sunrise to sunset, from east to west. He never had the courage to peer up at them and see how far the wings really did reach. They covered his mortal sky, and when he refused to stare up into their leaden pinions, they stooped to him and buffeted and smothered him, until he was such a mass of bruised suffering within that he could almost believe his body also was quivering into the numbness of acquiescent misery. And here were the wings again. They were even lower, in spite of this clear air. They did not merely shut it out from his nostrils, but the filthy pinions swept his face and roused in him the uttermost revulsion of mortal man against the accident of his mortality. The trouble of earth passed before him in its unceasing panorama, a pageant of pain and death. Every atom of creation was against every other atom, because everywhere was warfare, murder and rapine, for the mere chance of living. He had won his inherited chance by sheer luck of contest through millions of years while his forebears came up from the slime and the cave. The little hunted creature, shrieking out there in the wood in the clutch of a predatory enemy was not so lucky. It was the enemy who was lucky to-night, but to-morrow night the enemy himself might go down under longer claws and be torn by fangs stronger than his own. And God had made it so. And God did not care.

Raven lay there panting under the horror of it. The sweat started on his skin. He was afraid. It was not his own well-being he feared for. Man's life was short at the most. A few years might finish him up. It was unlikely that he need live again. But he feared seeing still more of the acts of this unmindful God, who could make, and set the wheel of being to turning and then stand aside and let them grind out their immeasurable grist of woe. And when he asked himself how he knew God was standing aside, letting the days and years fulfil their sum, he believed it was because he had suddenly become aware that time was a boundless sea and that the human soul was sometimes in the trough of it and sometimes on the crest. But never would the sea cast its derelicts upon warm shores where they might build the house of life and live in peace and innocence. Ever would they find themselves tossed from low to high and fall from high to low again in the salt wash of the retreating wave. For after all, it was the mysterious sea God had a mind to, never the derelict atoms afloat on it. They would have to take sea weather to time's extremest verge, as they always had taken it. They were derelicts.

As the light came, the leaden wings lifted and he went down to the early breakfast Charlotte and Jerry intended to eat alone. Charlotte, with her good morning, gave him a quick glance. He found she had not expected him so early and knew she saw at once how harassed he was. He insisted on sitting down to breakfast with them and, after Jerry had gone out, went over the house in a mindless way, into all the rooms, to give himself something to do. Also there seemed to be a propriety in it, a fittingness in presenting himself to his own walls and accepting their silent recognition. Then, hearing Charlotte upstairs, he went back into the kitchen, as straight as if he had meant to go there all the time and had merely idled on these delaying quests, and up to the nail by the shed door where the key always hung, the key to Old Crow's hut. He took it off the nail, dropped it in his pocket, got a leather jacket from the hall and went out into the road. As he went, he heard Jerry moving about in the barn and walked the faster, not to be halted or offered friendly company. At the great maples he paused, two of them marking the entrance to the wood road, and looked about him. The world was resolutely still. The snow was not deep, but none of it had melted. It was of a uniform whiteness and luster and the shadows in it were deeply blue. There were tracks frozen into it all along the road, many of them old ones, others just broken, the story of some animal's wandering. Then he turned into the wood road and began to climb the rise, and as he went he was conscious of an unaccountable excitement. Dick was responsible for that, he told himself. Dick had waked his mind to old memories. This was, in effect, and all owing to Dick, a tryst with Old Crow.

He remembered every step of the way, what he might find if he could sweep off the snow or wait until June and let the mounting sun sweep it according to its own method. Here at the right would be the great patch of clintonia. Further in at the left was tiarella, with its darling leaf, and along under the yellow birches the lady's slipper he had transplanted, year after year, and that finally took root and showed a fine sturdiness he had never seen exceeded elsewhere. He went on musing over the permanence of things and the mutability of mortal joy, wondering if, in this world He had made without remedies for its native ills, God could take pleasure in the bleak framework of it. And when he had nearly reached the top of the slope, the three firs, where a turn to the left would bring him to the log cabin door, suddenly he stopped as if his inner self heard the command to halt. He looked about him, and his heart began to beat hard. But he was not surprised. What could be more moving than the winter stillness of the woods in a spot all memories? Yet he was in no welcoming mood for high emotion, and looking up and about, to shake off the wood magic, there at a little distance at his right, between pine boles, he saw her, the woman. She was tall and slender, yet grandly formed. A blue cloak was wrapped about her and her head was bare. Her face had a gaunt beauty such as he had never seen. The eyes, richly blue but darkened by the startled pupil, were bewildering in their soft yet steady appealingness. Her hair was parted and carried back in waves extraordinarily thick and probably knotted behind. That, of course, he could not see. But the little soft rings of it about her forehead he noted absently. And her look was so full of dramatic tension, of patient, noble gravity, even grief, that one phrase flashed into his mind, "The Mother of Sorrows!" and stayed there. So moving was her face that, although he had at the first instant taken in her entire outline, the significance of it had not struck him until now. On her arm, in the immemorial mother's fashion, she carried a child. The child was in white and a blue scarf was tied about his head. When Raven saw the scarf, his tension relaxed. There was something about the scarf that was real, was earthly: a ragged break in one free corner. In the relief of seeing the break, and being thus brought back to tangible things, he realized that he had, in a perfect seriousness, for one amazing minute, believed the woman and the child to be not human but divine. They were, as they struck upon his eyes, a vision, and he would have been in no sense surprised to see the vision fade. It was the Virgin Mary and her Son. Now, as he realized with the lightning rapidity of a morbidly excited mind how terribly sensitive to his own needs he must be to have clutched so irrationally at a world-old remedy, he took off his hat and called to her:

"You startled me."

Without waiting for any response, he turned to the left, because the probabilities were that he had startled her also, and that was why she had stood there, petrified into the catalepsy of wood animals struck by cautionary fear. But, as he turned, a man's voice sounded through the woods, and waked an echo:

"Hullo!" it called. "Hullo!"

Raven involuntarily paused, and saw the woman running toward him. There were stumps in her way, but she stepped over them lightly, and once, when she had to cross a hollow where the snow lay deep, she sank in up to her knees, and Raven involuntarily stepped forward to help her. But she freed herself with incredible quickness and came on. It might have been water she was wading in, so little did it check her. She halted before him, only a pace away, as if she must be near in order to speak cautiously, and Raven noted the exquisite texture of her pale skin and the pathos of her eyes, the pupils distended now so that he wondered if they could be blue. Meantime the voice kept on calling, "Hullo! hullo!"

She spoke tremulously, in haste:

"He'll be up here in a minute. You say you ain't seen me."

"Is it some one you're afraid of?" Raven asked.

She nodded, in a dumb anguish.

"Then," said he, "we'll both stay here till he comes, and afterward I'll go with you, wherever you're going."

This, it seemed, moved her to a terror more acute.

"No! no!" she said, and she appeared to have so little breath to say it that, if he had not been watching her lips, he could not have caught it. "Not you. That would make him madder'n ever. You go away. Hide you somewheres, quick."

"No," said Raven, "I sha'n't hide. I'll hide you. Come along."

He took her by the arm and, though she was remonstrating breathlessly, hurried her to the left. They passed the three firs at the turn and he smiled a little, noting Jerry's good road and thinking there was some use in this combined insistence on his following the steps of Old Crow. There was the hut, in its rough kindliness, and there, the smoke told him, was a fire. Jerry had been up that morning, because Charlotte must have known he'd come there the first thing. Still smoothing the road to Old Crow! He had been fumbling with one hand for the key, the while he kept the other on her arm. She was so terrified a creature now that he did not trust her not to break blindly away and run. He unlocked the door, pushed her in, closed and locked it. Then he dropped the key in his pocket and went back to the wood road. With a sudden thought, he took his knife from his pocket and tossed it down the road into a little heap of brush. Meanwhile the man was coming nearer and, as he came, he called: "Hullo!"

Raven, waiting for him, speculated on the tone. What did it mean? It was a breathless tone, though not in any manner like the woman's. It was as if he had run and stumbled and caught himself up, and all the time been strangled from within by rage or some like madness. The woman's breathlessness had simply meant life's going out of her with sheer fright. Now the man was coming up the slope, bent at the shoulders, as if he carried a heavy load or as if almost doubling himself helped him to go the faster. He was a thin man with long arms and he carried an axe. Raven called to him:

"Hullo, there! Take a look as you come along and see if you can find my knife."

The man stopped short, straightened, and looked at him. Meantime Raven, bending in his search, went toward him, scrutinizing the road from side to side. He had a good idea of the fellow in the one glance he gave him: a pale, thin face, black eyes with a strange spark in them, a burning glance like the inventor's or the fanatic's, and black hair. It was an ascetic face, and yet there was passion of an unnamed sort ready to flash out and do strange things, overthrow the fabric of an ordered life perhaps, or contradict the restraint of years. He stood motionless until Raven, still searching, had got within three feet of him. Then he spoke:

"Who be you?"

He had a low voice, agreeable, even musical. Raven concluded he must have been strangely moved to break into that mad "Hullo." It had been more, he thought, that wild repetition with the echo throwing it back, like the Gabriel hounds. But Raven took no notice of the question. He spoke with a calculated peevishness.

"I'm willing to bet my knife is within three feet, and see how the confounded thing's hidden itself. It was right along here. Let me take your axe and I'll blaze a tree."

The man, without a word, passed him the axe and Raven notched a sapling. Then, still holding the axe, he turned to the man with a smile. No one had ever told him what a charming smile it was. Anne used to wonder, in her dignified anguishes of love forbidden, if she could ever make him understand how he looked when he smiled.

"Well," said Raven, "who may you be?"

"My name's Tenney," said the man, in the low, vibrant voice.

"Oho!" said Raven, remembering Charlotte's confidences. Then, as Tenney frowned slightly and glanced at him in a questioning suspicion, he continued, "Then we're neighbors. My name's Raven."

The man nodded.

"They said you were comin'," he remarked.

He held out his hand for the axe. Raven, loath to give it to him, yet saw no excuse for withholding it. After all, she was safely locked in. So he tossed the axe and Tenney caught it lightly, and was turning away. But he stopped, considered a moment, looking down at the ground, and then, evidently concluding the question had to be put, broke out, and, Raven thought, shamefacedly:

"You seen anything of her up here?"

"Her?" Raven repeated, though he knew the country shyness over family terms.

"Yes. My woman."

"Your wife?" insisted Raven. "I don't believe I know her. No, I'm sure I don't. I've been away several years. On the road, you mean? No—not a soul."

A swift rage passed over Tenney's face. It licked it like a flash of evil light and Raven thought he saw how dangerous he could be.

"No," he said, "I don't mean on the road. I mean in the woods."

"Up here?" persisted Raven. "No, certainly not. This is no place for a woman. A woman would have to be off her head to come traipsing up here in the snow. Is that what you were yelling about? I thought you were a catamount, at least."

He laughed. He had an idea, suddenly conceived, that the man, having a keen sense of personal dignity, was subject to ridicule, and that a laugh would be salutary for him. And he was right. Tenney straightened, put his axe over his shoulder, and walked away down the hill.



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.