not given any reason for coming and that Tenney might
remember it afterward and wonder.

"I thought I'd run up," he said, "and pay you for your week's work."

Tenney was darting about with a small tin tub, filling it from the
kettle and trying the temperature with his hand.

"No," he answered absorbedly, "I can't bother with that to-night. Let it
be till another time."

He had drawn a chair to his wife's side and set the tub on it, and now
she also tried the temperature while he watched her anxiously. And at
once the baby who, in his solemnity of silence, had seemed to Raven
hitherto little more than a stage property, broke into a lusty yelling,
and Tenney put out his hands to him, took him to his shoulder and began
to walk the floor, while the woman poured more water into the tub.
Neither of them had a look for Raven, and he went out into the
blustering night with a picture etched so deeply on his brain that he
knew it would always be there while he, in his flesh, survived: the old
picture of the sacred three, behind the defenses of their common
interests, the father, mother and the child.

XIV

All that night Raven, through his light sleep, had a consciousness of
holding on to himself, refusing to think, refusing angrily to fear. The
sleep seemed to him like a thin, slippery coating over gulfs unplumbed;
it was insecure, yet it failed to let him down into blessed depths of
oblivion below. But he would not think to no purpose (he had a dread of
the wild, disordered clacking of the wheels in unproductive thought),
and he would not invite again the strange humiliation, the relief tinged
by aversion, that came over him when he felt, on leaving them, the
inviolability of the three in their legal bond. She had looked to him so
like heaven's own, he had upborne her in his thought almost to the gate
of heaven itself; and yet she was walled in by a bond she would not
repudiate with the brute who persecuted her. In spite of her uncouth
speech, in spite of her ignorance of delicate usage, she seemed to him a
creature infinitely removed from the rougher aspects of this New England
life; yet there she was in one of the most sordid scenes of it, and she
was absorbed by it, she fitted it as a Madonna fits a cave. And what
business had he, he asked angrily, to weave about her the web of a
glorifying sympathy, exalting her only from that pernicious habit of his
of being sorry? Yet, as he thought it, he knew she was diff