ooking 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 w