they'll git it."

"Yes," said Tira. "I think 's likely."

She got up to bring the pie, warming in the oven, and when her back was
toward him she allowed herself a smile, happy, unrestrained, at Raven's
thought for her. She knew why Tenney was to be drawn off down to the
river pasture. This was a part of Raven's understanding and his
beneficence.

"You goin'?" she asked, returning to her chair.

"Yes," said Tenney. "Might 's well."

When he had eaten he went out to his chores and she cleared the table
and walked about the house with a light step. She had been working
heavily of late, with a dull mind, but now there seemed to be a reason
for doing every task as perfectly as it could be done. There was not a
suspicion in her mind that Raven had a charm for her or that she could
possibly have a charm for him. He had simply opened a window for the
light to come in; he had shown her the door of escape. This was the
first simple kindness she had ever had. When she was little, the family
life had been a disorderly struggle for bare existence, and as she grew
into an ignorant girlhood she began to be angrily conscious that she
herself, she who did not recognize the power of her own beauty and with
it the strange force that lay beneath it, like a philter, for man's
undoing, was an object of pursuit by men made mad through passions she
hated. She had the simplest tastes, the most inconsiderable desires. She
would go off by herself then and spend a day wandering about the woods,
cooling her feet in brooks, sleeping under a tree. No man could make her
happiness completer, hanging about her steps, staring her down with
bold, impudent eyes. She even thought, in a formless way (for she had no
orderly inner life of wonder and conclusion) whether she should have
taken refuge with the light-haired man who was now driving Tenney to
madness, if he had not had that drollery of looking at you, like a boy
really, who cared only for a boy's fitful fun. But he was not kind. The
kindness had been only to lure her into trusting him, just as Tenney's
had turned into a rage of abusive jealousy. Raven's kindness was
different. It was not in any degree personal to her. She knew he would
have been as merciful to a squirrel caught in a trap. And the scars of
his own mental sufferings and restraints had done something to him,
something inexplicable that made him wonderful in her eyes. He seemed,
too, all-powerful. He was that miraculous combinatio