his indictment against the way things were made.

The Tenney house, when he approached it, was cold in the darkness of the
storm. The windows were inhospitably blank, and his heart fell with
disappointment. He went up to the side door looking out on the pile of
wood that was the monument to Tenney's rages, and knocked sharply. No
one came. He knocked again, and suddenly there was a clatter within, as
if some one had overturned a chair, and steps came stumbling to the
door. A voice came with them, Tenney's voice.

"That you?" he called.

He called it three times. Then he flung open the door and leaned out
and, from his backward recoil, Raven knew he had hoped unreasonably to
find his wife, knocking at her own door. Raven kicked his feet against
the step, with an implication of being snow-clogged and cold.

"How are you?" he said. "Let me come in, won't you? It's going to be an
awful night."

Tenney stepped back, let him enter, and closed the door behind him. They
stood together in the darkness of the entry. Raven concluded he was not
to be told which way to go.

"Smells warm in here," he said, taking a step to the doorway at the
left. "This the kitchen?"

Tenney recovered herself.

"Walk in," he said. "I'll light up."

Raven, standing in the spacious kitchen, all a uniform darkness, it was
so black outside, could hear the man breathe in great rasping gulps, as
if he were recovering from past emotion or were still in its grasp. He
had taken a lamp down from the high mantel and set it on the table. Now
he was lighting it, and his hand shook. The lamp burning and bringing
not only light but a multitude of shadows into the kitchen, he turned
upon Raven.

"Well," he said, harshly. "Say it. Git it over."

Raven heard in his voice new signs of a tremendous, almost an hysterical
excitement. It had got, he knew, to be quieted before she came.

"If you'll allow me," he said, "I'll sit down. I'm devilish cold."

"Don't swear," said Tenney, still in that sharp, exasperated voice, and
Raven guessed he was nervously afraid, at such a crisis, of antagonizing
the Most High.

The vision of his own grandmother came up before him, she who would not
let him read a child's book in a thunder shower lest God should consider
the act too trivial in the face of elemental threatening and strike him
dead. He took one of the straight-backed chairs by the stove and leaned
forward with an absorbed pretense of warming his chilled hand