eard it.

"You stir a step to git the law on him an' I'll tell what I know. What
did I find out about you? The money stole out o' the box after they had
the raffle for the War, the deed under old lady Blaisdell's feather bed,
because it wa'n't recorded an' it left you with the right an' title to
that forty feet o' land. Five counts!" She held up her left hand and
told off one finger after the other. "I've got 'em all down in my mind,
an' there they've been ever since I left you. What d' I leave you for?
Not because you treated me like a dog, whenever the fit was on ye, but
because you was meaner'n dirt."

He sat there, the reins gathered in his hand, staring at her, his face
stiffened in a reflex of the cold passion of hers. Upon her last word,
he called to the horse with an oath as if it had been the beast that
offended him, turned the sleigh and drove off. Tenney, breathless, was
now on the scene. His thin lips curled and drew back, the snarl of the
angry feline.

"Two on ye," he said to Raven. "Come to blows over her, have ye? An'
you're on top."

Raven turned to Tira.

"Go into the house," he said.

Tenney laughed. It was not the laugh of the man who had just left them.
There was no light mockery in it, but a low intensity of misery, the
cynical recognition of a man whose house has been destroyed and who asks
his inner self how he could have expected anything different. But when
he spoke it was jeeringly, to Tira.

"Go into the house," he mocked. "Didn't ye hear him? He tells ye to go
into the house, into my house, so's he can fight it out ag'in same's he
done with t'other one. You better go. He won't git no odds from me."

He set his dinner pail down beside him, and his hand moved a few inches
along the helve of his axe. And Raven, like Tira, was sorry for him.

"No," said Tira, "I sha'n't go into the house. An' this to-do ain't so
much about me as about you, Isr'el Tenney, because you're makin' a fool
o' yourself. You'll be town talk, an' you deserve to be. You've brought
it on yourself."

Raven, his eyes on the man's face, saw it change slightly: something
tremulous had come into it, though it might have been only surprise. The
hand on the axe helve shook perceptibly. Now it looked to Raven as if it
might be his turn.

"I came up here this morning," he said, "to see her." Curiously, at the
moment of saying "your wife," he balked at it. He would not, even by the
sanction of the word, seem to give her