lement as he was, going to spy on Tenney
and hear him pray. What other reason was there? He and Nan simply wanted
to search out the reactions in Tenney's spiritual insides in order to
defeat him the more neatly.

The house was brightly lighted downstairs. Six or eight sleighs stood in
the shelter of the long open shed at right angles to the barn. The
horses had been taken in and blanketed. When Raven and Nan arrived, no
one else was outside, and he was about to knock when Nan, who remembered
the ways of neighborhood prayer-meetings, opened the door and stepped
in. Men and women were seated in a couple of rows about the walls of the
two front rooms, and Tenney stood in the square entry beside a table
supplied with a hymn-book, a Bible, and a lamp. He had the unfamiliar
aspect of a man reduced to discomfort of mind by the strictures of a
Sunday suit. His eyes were burning and his mouth compressed. What did
they mean, that passion of the distended pupil, that line of tightened
lip? Was it the excitement of leadership, the responsibility of being
"in charge" of the solemn convention of prayer-meeting? It was the face,
Nan thought, of one who knew the purposes of God from the first word of
creation to the last, and meant to enforce them by every mastery known
to man: persuasion, rage, and cruelty. She gave him a good evening and
he jerked his head slightly in response. The occasion was evidently too
far out of the common to admit of ordinary greetings. A man and woman
just inside the doorway of the front room moved along, and signed Raven
and Nan to take their vacated seats. As soon as they were settled Tenney
began to "lead in prayer," and Raven, his mind straying from the words
as negligible and only likely to increase his aversion to the man, sat
studying the furnishings of the room, a typical one, like all the
parlors of the region from the time of his boyhood to that of his father
and Old Crow. There was the center table with the album and three red
volumes of Keepsakes and Garlands, a green worsted mat, hopefully
designed to imitate moss, and on the depression in its center the astral
lamp. On the wall opposite were pictures of Tenney's father and mother,
painful enlargements from stiff photographs, and on the neighboring wall
a glazed framing of wax flowers and a hair wreath. The furniture was
black walnut upholstered with horsehair. Tenney was of the more
prosperous line of farmers. And yet he had not begun so. All th