with you."

On these words, he was about turning away, when he found Tenney suddenly
oblivious of him. The man's thin face was quivering into a pathetic
disorder, flushed, quite beyond his control. He neither heard Raven nor
saw him, though he did speak brokenly:

"There!" he said. "There she is now."

Raven, turning, followed his gaze, directed up the road, not the way he
had come. There she was, walking toward them with swift, long steps, the
child held with the firmness that still seemed a careless buoyancy, as
he had seen her in the woods. She had come home, as she went, the back
way. Raven could have stood there through the long minute, motionless,
waiting for her to come to him, for it seemed as if it were to him she
came, not Tenney. But he recalled himself with a brusqueness so rough
and sudden that it was as if he gave himself a blow. That last glance
had shown him she had nothing more to fear from Tenney, for this time at
least. The man had been horribly frightened at her going. Now he was
under her heel. Raven did not give her another look. He turned homeward,
and called back to Tenney loudly enough for her to overhear him and be
under no apprehension as to what had passed:

"Make up your mind, then come and talk it over with Jerry. It's
chopping, you understand, gray birches down in the river pasture."

Tenney did not answer, and Raven, striding along the road, listened with
all possible intentness to hear whether husband and wife spoke together.
He thought not, but he did hear the closing of a door.

XI

Thyatira--this was her name, and she was called Tira--passed her husband
apparently without a glance. Nevertheless she had, in approaching,
become adequately aware of his disordered look, and the fact of it
calmed her to a perfect self-possession. She could always, even from one
of these fleeting glimpses, guess at the stage his madman's progress had
reached, and the present drop in temperature restored her everyday sense
of safety. With it came a sudden ebbing of energy and endurance. The
"spell" was over for the time, but her escape from the shadow of it left
her nerveless and almost indifferent to its returning; apathetic, too,
to her tormentor. Going in, she closed the door behind her, apparently
not noticing that he followed her, and when he opened it and came in,
she was sitting in his great chair by the fire, taking off the baby's
coat, and, with the capable, anxious mother motion, fee