-still he
dared not put her off a step from the intimacy of neighborly relations
by presenting Nan more formally--"and spend the night there. In the
morning, you'll go back to Boston with her. I shall enter a complaint
against your husband."

It wasn't so hard to give Tenney the intimacy of that name, now she
looked so sweetly calm. She started from her dream, glanced up at him
and, to his renewed discomfort, broke into a little laugh. It was sheer
amusement, loving raillery too, of him who could give her the priceless
gift of a God made man and then ask her to forsake the arena where the
beasts were harmless now because she no longer feared them.

"Why, bless your heart," she said, in a homespun fashion of address that
might have been Charlotte's, "I wouldn't no more run away! An' if you
should have him before the judge, I'd no more say a word ag'inst him! I
wouldn't git you into any trouble either," she explained, in an anxious
loyalty. "I'd say you was mistaken, that's all."

Something seemed to break in him.

"What do you mean?" he asked roughly. "What do you think you mean? I
suppose you're in love with him?"

Tira looked at him patiently. She yielded to a little sigh.

"Why," she said, "that's where I belong. I don't," she continued
hesitatingly, in her child's manner of explaining herself from her
inadequate vocabulary, "I guess I don't think about them things much,
not same as men-folks think. But there's one or two things I've got to
look out for." Here she gave that quick significant glance at the little
mound on the couch. "An' there ain't no way to do it less'n I stay right
there in my tracks."

Raven, his hand gripping the mantel, rested his forehead on it and dark
thoughts came upon him. They quickened his breath and brought the blood
to his face and his aching eyes. It was all trouble, it seemed to him,
trouble from the first minute of his finding her in the woods. She might
draw some temporary comfort from his silent championship, in the
momentary safety of this refuge he had given her. But he could by no
means cut her knot of difficulty. She was as far from him as she had
been the moment before he saw her. She was speaking.

"It ain't," she said, in a low voice, "it ain't that I don't keep in
mind what you've done for me, what you're doin' all the time. But I
guess you don't see what you've done this night's the most of all. Now
you've told me you know it's true"--here she was shy before the ta