he road.

"Forty-eight minutes," said Raven. "We'll walk twenty and then cut back.
Come on."

They walked a little, raced a little, talked--not much--and laughed a
great deal. Raven was in the highest spirits, sure he was sending her
off happy, since she would go. Never afterward could they remember what
they talked about: only it seemed a fortunate moment stolen from the
penury of years. Again he took out his watch.

"Time's up!" he said, and they went back.

The station was alive with its small activities. Jerry was walking
Nellie up and down. The train came in and when Nan left him Raven
remembered they had not said good-by. There was a kind of permanence in
it; the moment had cemented something into bonds. When she had gone he
and Jerry got into the pung and drove away leading Nellie, and then
Raven remembered he had not breakfasted. They talked horse all the way
home, and when Dick, appearing on the porch, called to them:

"What you got Nellie for?"

Raven answered cheerfully:

"I took a notion."

Then he and Dick went in to breakfast, and Nan's name was not mentioned.
Charlotte, Raven concluded, had told the boy she was gone. He seemed to
detect in Dick some watchful kindness toward himself, the responsible
care attendants manifest toward the incapable. Dick was, he concluded,
bent on therapeutic measures.

XXX

Tira, from the forenoon of Tenney's accident, entered on uneventful
days. He lowered over his helplessness; he was angry with it. But the
anger was not against her, and she could bear it. For the first time she
saw his activities fettered, and the mother in her answered. She
ventured no outspoken sympathy, but he was dependent on her and in that,
much as it chafed him, she found solace. He was chained to his chair,
his wounded foot on a rest, and he had no diversions. Tira sometimes
wondered what he was thinking when he sat looking out at the road,
smooth with the grinding of sleds and slipping of sleighs. Once she
brought the Bible and laid it before him on a stand. If its exposition
was so precious to him at evening meeting, there would be comfort in it
now. But he glanced at her in what looked like a quick suspicion--did it
mean he thought she meant to taunt him with the unreality of his
faith?--and, after it had lain there a forenoon untouched, he said to
her uneasily:

"You put that away."

She took it back to its place on the parlor stand under Grandsir
Tenney's hatchet-faced