s. But he
was not reassuring Tenney. He was still more exasperating him.

"Say it, can't you?" the man cried to him piercingly. "Tell it an' git
it over." Then, as Raven merely looked at him in a civil inquiry,
"You've got suthin' to break, ain't ye? Break it an' leave me be."

Raven understood. The man's mind was on his wife, fled out into the
storm. His inflamed imagination was picturing disaster for her. He was
wild with apprehension. And it was well he should be wild. It was a pity
she was likely to come so soon. Raven would have been glad to see his
emotions run the whole scale from terror to remorse before she came, if
come she would, to allay them.

"No," he said quietly, "I haven't anything to break. But it's going to
be an awful night. I guess there will be things to break about the folks
that are out in it."

Tenney came up to him and peered down at him in blank terror.

"Who's out in it?" he asked. "Who've you seen?"

Raven laughed jarringly. It did seem to him grimly amusing to be
dallying thus with a man's fears. He was not used to playing games with
the human creature's destiny. He had always looked too seriously on all
such drama, perhaps because he had been so perplexed by drama of his
own. If his life was too puzzling a thing to be endured, was not all
life, perhaps, equally puzzling and therefore too delicate a matter to
be meddled with? But now the game was on, the game of sheer diplomacy.
The straight and obvious path wouldn't do if he was to save a woman who
handicapped him in advance by refusing to let herself be saved.

"The night?" he repeated. "Who's out in it? Why, I'm out in it myself;
at least, I have been. But now I'm here by this stove, I don't know when
you'll get rid of me. Put in a stick, won't you, Tenney? These big rooms
have a way of cooling off before you know it."

Tenney did put in a stick and more. He crammed the stove with light
stuff and opened draughts. Raven noted, in the keen way his mind had
taken up, of snatching at each least bit of safety for the woman, that
the tea kettle was boiling. She would be chilled. She would need hot
water. And suddenly he felt the blood in his face. There was a hand at
the latch of the side door. Tenney, too, heard it. He threw back into
the box the stick of wood he had selected and made three strides to the
entry. Again he called, in that voice of sharp anxiety:

"That you?"

She opened the door just before he could put out his hand