ll be
nice to you. Why, if Charlotte found out a thing like this was going on
in the neighborhood, she'd go for him tooth and nail."

"No," said she, in a dull decision. "I can't. It would all come on you."

He understood. The madman would drag him into that range of jealous fury
and because he was a man.

"I can look out for myself," he said roughly, "and you, too."

Again she shook her head.

"No," she said, "he might kill you. Anyways, he'd burn your barn."

"He won't kill me," said Raven, "and I don't care a hang about my barn.
Let him burn. Good thing. I'll clap him into jail and you'll know where
he is. Now!" He looked at the clock on the mantel. "I'm going. In just
twenty minutes you start and come along as fast as you want to. I'll be
at your house."

She had begun to speak, but he paid no attention. He turned up his
collar and stepped out into the storm.

"Lock the door," he called back to her. "Keep it locked till you go."

The road down the slope was scarcely clogged at all. The firs, waving
now and interlocking their branches in that vague joy or trouble of the
winter wind, were keeping off the powdery drift. When he got to his
house he saw Jerry on the way to the barn, but he did not hail him.
Possibly Jerry had paid Tenney for his week, and although Raven's own
diplomacy would stick at nothing, he preferred to act in good faith,
possibly so that he might act the better. He smiled a little at that and
wondered, in passing, if he were never to be allowed any arrogance of
perfect behavior, if he had always got to be so sorry for the floating
wisps of humanity that seemed to blow his way as to go darting about,
out of his own straight course, to pluck them back to safety. There were
serious disadvantages, he concluded, as he often had before, in owning a
feminine vein of temperament. He went in at the front door and up the
stairs, took a roll of money from his desk and ran down again. Charlotte
had not seen him. She was singing in the kitchen in a fragmentary way
she had when life went well with her, and the sound filled Raven with an
unreasoning anger. Why should any woman, even so dear and all deserving
as Charlotte, live and thrive in the warmth and light while that other
creature, of as simply human cravings, battled her way along from cliff
to cliff, with the sea of doom below, beating against the land that was
so arid to her and waiting only to engulf her? That, he thought, was
another count in