Burn the
house down, I guess, over my head."

The last she said absently. She was arranging the blanket about her with
an anxious care, evidently making it so secure that she need not use her
hands in holding. They would be given to the baby.

"Burn my house down, will he? Let him try it," said Raven, under his
breath.

She looked at him in a calm-eyed reproach that was all motherly.

"We mustn't have no trouble," said she. "I dunno what I should do if I
brought that on you."

"What does the man mean," Raven broke out, chiefly to attract her
attention and keep her there under shelter, "by going dotty half the
time and the other half butting in and asking people if they're saved?"

"Did he ask you?" she inquired. She nodded, as if it were precisely what
might have been expected. "I s'pose he thinks he has to. He's a very
religious man."

"Religious!" Raven muttered. "Does he have to do the other thing, too:
go off his nut?"

She was looking at him gravely. Suddenly it came to him he must be more
sympathetic in his attitude. He must not let her feel rebuffed, thinking
he did not understand.

"I dunno's I blame him," she said slowly, as if she found it a wearingly
difficult matter and meant to be entirely just. "You see he had
provocation." The red came flooding into her cheeks. "He come home from
work an' what should he see but the man, the one I told you----"

She stopped, and Raven supplied, in what he hoped was an unmoved manner:

"The one that looks up kinder droll?"

For his life he could not have helped repeating the words as she had
given them to him. He had found them too poignant in their picturesque
drama to be paraphrased or forgotten.

"Yes," she said eagerly. She was relieved to be helped. "He drove up in
his sleigh, about fifteen minutes 'fore Isr'el come home. He come up to
the house. I went to the door. 'What do you want?' I says. Then he begun
to say things, foolish things same's he always did----"

She stumbled there, as if in shame, and Raven knew what kind of things
they were: things about her eyes, her lips, insulting things to an
honest wife, taunting things, perhaps, touching the past. More and more
she seemed to him like a mother of sorrows, a child unjustly scourged
into the dark mysteries of passion and pain.

"Never mind," he said reassuringly. "Don't try to tell me. Don't think
of them."

But she would tell him. It seemed as if she had to justify herself.

"He told me he