ve. He felt in her the alert readiness of a
perfectly acting nervous system. It showed itself in her self-control,
her readiness of courage, her persistent calm. She would not thrill with
apprehension over the tapping of those boughs against the walls: only at
a voice or a human tread.

When he went in at his own door Charlotte appeared, with a quick step,
from the kitchen. She was relieved, he saw. Dear Charlotte! she did not
know how his anxieties were mounting, but she did feel the uneasiness he
had brought with him. He tried to throw her off the track of her silent
interrogations.

"I'm dog tired," he told her. "I believe I'll go to bed."

"That's right," said she. "Your fire's been blazed up quite a while."

"Don't you know," he called back to her from the stairs, "how we always
sleep when we first come? I suppose it's the altitude."

"Yes," said Charlotte. "So 'tis, anyhow accordin' to Jerry."

Raven carried the look of her anxious, warm-colored face with him. It
was all motherly. Yet she had no children. Jerry lived under the daily
chrism of that soft well-wishing. And there was the woman up the road,
looking like a spiritual mother of men and strangely, mysteriously, also
like the ancient lure that makes men mad, and she had to fight like a
tigress for the mere life of her child. The contrast leaped into the
kaleidoscopic disorder he saw now as life like a brilliant, bizarre
fragment to make the whole scheme (if the scheme could be even estimated
by mortal minds) more disorderly still. But he was tired and he slept.
It would be good, he had thought for many weeks now, when he felt
himself drifting off, to sleep forever. To-night he did not want that
everlasting sleep. He wanted life, life to its full of power and
probity, to stand between the woman and her terror. Suddenly he woke,
and lay, his heart beating hard at the sound of the pines in the grove.
Charlotte had done her best to put the breadth of the house between him
and their lamenting, but their voices crept round the corner and into
his open windows, and invaded his mind. He lay there, the wind on his
face and that sighing melancholy of theirs calling him to an answering
sadness of his own. And now it was not his inexplicable panic of
disaffection toward the earth as God had made it, but a pageant of
darkness where formless terrors moved, all hostile to the woman. At this
moment, she seemed to him the point of blinding pain about which the
general