he Lord Jesus Christ."

The telephone bell rang and she went off to answer it. Tenney, as if
with a hopeful conviction that another man would understand, turned his
eyes upon Raven.

"What's anybody want to talk like that for?" he questioned
irrepressibly.

"It's the way you talk yourself," said Raven. "That's precisely what you
said last night."

"It's no kind of a way----" Tenney began, and then pulled himself up.
Raven believed that he meant it was one thing to invoke the Founder of
his religion in a sacerdotal sense, but not for the comforting certainty
of a real Presence. "Seems if anybody's crazed. Seems if----" Here he
broke off again, and Raven took satisfaction in the concluding phrase:
"It's no way to talk when a man's lamed himself so's't he can't git
round the room 'thout bleedin' to death."

By this Raven understood the man was, in an hysterical way, afraid of
Tira and her surprising invocation. He judged things were looking rather
better for her, and went off almost cheerfully, without waiting for her
return.

XXVI

When Raven came to Nan's, he went in without knocking and found the
house still. He called her name, and she answered from an upper
distance. Presently she appeared, traveling bag in hand, and came down
to him.

"You really want me, Rookie?" she asked him, pausing at the closet door
where she had hung her hat and coat. "You want an unattached female,
unchaperoned, very much at large?"

"I want her," said Raven, "more than anything else I'm likely to get in
this frowsy world. As to chaperons, Charlotte will do very well, without
legging it over here every night to keep you in countenance."

Nan put on her hat and coat, and he picked up the bag.

"Back door locked?" he asked.

She laughed.

"Yes," said she. "That shows I meant to come. Go ahead, Rookie. I'll
lock this door." Mid-way down the path, she glanced at him and then
ventured: "You look very much set up. What is it, Rookie? what
happened?"

"The thing that's happened," said Raven, with a little reminiscent
laugh, "is that Tenney's afraid of his wife. And he's cut his foot and
can't get away from her. I call it the most ironical of time's revenges
I've ever had the pleasure of seeing."

He went on and told her the story of Tenney's disabled foot. Nan,
listening, did not take it in.

"But I don't see," she offered, "why it makes him afraid of her."

"It doesn't. Though it makes it more difficult for him to ge