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 stare