ite got the better of him, "what? What you got to tell?"

"It ain't so," she said, her voice broken by her chattering lips.
"Before God, it ain't so."

"So ye know what I mean," he jeered, and even at the moment she had
compassion for him, reading his unhappy mind and knowing he hurt himself
unspeakably. "Ye know, or ye wouldn't say 'tain't so."

Words of his own sprang up in her memory like witnesses against him,
half phrases embodying his suspicion of her, wild accusations when, like
a drunken man, he had let himself go. But this he did not remember. She
knew that. Shut up in his cell of impeccable righteousness, he believed
he had dealt justly with her and no more. She would not taunt him with
his words. She had a compassion for him that reached into his future of
possible remorse. Tira saw, and had seen for a long time, a catastrophe,
a "wind-up" before them both. Sometimes it looked like a wall that
brought them up short, sometimes a height they were both destined to
fall from and a gulf ready to receive them, and she meant, if she could,
to save him from the recognition of the wall as something he had built
or the gulf as something he had dug. As she sat looking at him now,
wide-eyed, imploring, and the child trod her knee impatiently, a man
went past the window to the barn. It was Jerry, gone to fodder the
cattle, and Jerry brought Raven to her mind who, if he was obeying her
by absence, was none the less protecting her. The trouble of her face
vanished and she drew a quick breath Tenney was quick to note.

"Who's that?" he asked her sharply, turning in his chair to command the
other window.

"Jerry," she said. Her heart stilled, and she began to dress the child,
with her mother's deftness. "He comes a little early to fodder, 'fore he
does his own."

"I dunno," said Tenney, irritably because he had to wear out his spleen,
"why you can't fodder the cows when anybody's laid up. There's women
that do it all the time if their folks are called away."

"Why, I could," said Tira, with a clear glance at him, "only he won't
let me."

"What's he got to do with it," said Tenney, in surprise. "Won't let ye?
Jerry Slate won't let ye? Jerry ain't one to meddle nor make. I guess if
you told him 'twas your place to do it an' you'd ruther stan' up to it,
he'd have no more to say."

The blood came again to her face. She had almost, she felt, spoken
Raven's name, and a swift intuition told her she must bury even the
thou