erent from
the ordinary country woman afraid of her man, and that any fine mantle
he wove for her could not equal the radiance of her pure courage and
undaunted truth.

Once he rose from his bed and began to dress hastily, with what he
recognized at the same moment as the wild purpose of slipping out of the
house and going up to Tenney's, to see if there was a light or to listen
for the catamount voice. But that, he realized immediately, was folly.
Suppose Tenney saw him. What reason could he plant in the man's inflamed
mind, except one more hostile to her peace? So he went back to bed,
chilled, and was savagely glad of his discomfort. It gave him something,
however trivial, to think about besides the peril of a woman who looked
like motherhood incarnate, and so should have been heir to all the
worship and chivalry of men. With the first light he was up and had
built his fire, and Charlotte, hearing him, got, sooner than was her
wont, out of her warm bed. Charlotte owned to liking to "lay a spell" in
winter, to make up for the early activities of summer mornings when you
must be "up 'fore light" to keep pace with the day. For after nine
o'clock "the day's 'most gone." She looked up at him as he came into the
kitchen where she was brashing her fire for a quick oven, and he found
her eyes clearly worried in their questioning.

"No toast, Charlotte," he said. He wondered if even his voice was
trembling in his haste. "No biscuits. I'm going up to the hut."

Charlotte nodded and seemed to settle into understanding. She had a
sympathetic, almost a reverent tolerance for the activities of pen and
ink. To her, Raven was a well-beloved and in no wise a remarkable being
until he stepped into the clouded room of literary activity. There she
would have indulged him in any whim or unaccountable tyranny. Charlotte
had never heard of temperament, but she believed in it. Once only did
she speak to him while he was drinking his coffee:

"You got any ink up there?"

He started and looked at her a moment, dazed. Nothing was further from
his mind than ink. Other liquids, tears, waters of lethe, lakes of fire
and brimstone would not have sounded foreign to his thought. But ink!
how incalculably far was the life of the written word from this raw
anguish of reality he was caught in to-day! He recovered himself
instantly.

"I've got my pen," he told her, "my stylograph."

And presently he had put on his coat, bidden her a hasty good-by