oble 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