ing at him, as if her mind were tied into knots, as if she
could neither untie them, nor conceive of anybody's doing it. But he
could not know just what sort of turmoil was in her nor how it was so
strange to her that she felt no mental strength to meet it. In the
instinct to talk to him, that new impulse born out of the first human
companionship she had ever had, she felt strange troubles within her
mind, an anguish of desire, formless and untrained. She was like a child
who stretches out arms to something it dearly longs for and finds its
fingers will not close on it. She had never, before knowing him, felt
the least hunger to express anything that did not lie within the small
circle of her little vocabulary. But her mind was waking, stretching
itself toward another mind, and suffering from its own impotence.

"O God!" she said, in a low tone, and then clapped her hand over her
mouth, because she had not meant to speak that name.

There came a knock at the door. Instantly the look of life ebbed from
her face. It assumed at once its mask of stolid calm. She got up and
went to the door and Raven, waiting for her to come back, remembered
absently he had heard the clang of bells. Visualizing her face as she
had talked to him, trying to understand her at every point, the more as
she could not explain herself, he was suddenly and sharply recalled. He
heard her voice.

"No," she cried, so distinctly that the sound came through the crack of
the door she had left ajar. "No, no, I tell you. You never've stepped
foot into this house by my will, an', so long as I'm in it, you never
shall."

Raven rose and went to the door. He had not stopped to think what he
should find, but at least it was, from her tone, a menace of some sort.
There stood Eugene Martin, in his fur coat, his florid extravagance of
scarf and pin, on his face the ironic smile adapted to his preconceived
comedy with Tira. Martin, hearing the step behind her, started,
unprepared. He had passed Tenney, slowly making his way homeward, and
counted on a few minutes' speech with her and a quick exit, for his
butt, the fool of a husband, to see. But as Raven appeared, the fellow's
face broke up in a flouting amusement. Here was another, the satiric
lips were ready to swear. Deepest distrust of Tira shone forth in the
half smile; a low community of mean understanding was in his following
glance at Raven. He burst into a loud laugh, took off his hat and made
Tira an exa