"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 sai