arly breakfast an' we eat, but he kep' watchin' me. I'd ketch
him doin' it while he stirred his tea. 'Twas as if he was afraid. I
wouldn't have him feel that way. You don't s'pose he is afraid o' me, do
you?"

This she poured out in a haste unlike her usual halting utterance. But
there was a steadiness in it, a calm. He shook his head.

"No," he said. "I wish he were afraid of you." He wanted to leave her
the comfort of belief and at the same time waken her to the actual
perils of her life. "Tira," he said, looking into her eyes and trying to
impress her with the force of his will, "he isn't right, you know, not
right in his head, or he never would behave to you as he does. Any man
in his senses would know you were true to him. He doesn't, and that's
why he's so dangerous."

A convulsive movement passed over her face, slight as a twitching of
muscles could well be. The sweat broke out on her chin.

"No," she said, "any man wouldn't know. Because it's true. That man that
come into this house last night an' set down side o' me--an' glad enough
he was there happened to be that chair left, same as if I'd left it for
him--he's bad all through, an' every man in this township knows it, an'
they know how I know it, an' how I found it out." The drops on her
forehead had wet the curling rings of her hair and she put up her hand
and swept them impatiently away. Her eyes, large in their agonized
entreaty, were on Raven's, and he suffered for her as it was when he had
seen her at the moments of her flight into the woods. And now he seemed
to see, not her alone, but Nan, not a shred of human pathos that had
been tossed from hand to hot hand, but something childlike and
inviolate. And that was how he let himself speak.

"But, dear child," he said, "Tenney knows how faithful you are. He knows
if you hadn't loved him you wouldn't have married him. And he knows if
you love anybody, you're true through everything."

"That's it," she said loudly, in a tone that echoed strangely in the
great kitchen. "That's it."

He knew what she meant. If she loved the man, she could convince him,
mad as he was. But she did not love him. She was merely clinging to him
with all the strength of her work-toughened hands.

"But talk to him," he insisted. "Show him how well you mean toward him."

"I can't," she said. "I never've talked to anybody, long as I lived. I
git"--she paused for a word and ended in a dash: "I git all froze up."

She sat star