y she trembled at. He had drawn his conclusions; nothing she
could possibly say would alter them.

"Comin' in, wa'n't he?" the assured voice asked her. "See me, didn't he,
an' give it up?"

Tira forced herself to look at him, and the anguished depths of her eyes
were moving to him only because they seemed to mourn over his having
found her out.

"No, Isr'el," she said quietly. "He wa'n't comin' in. He drew up because
he see you, an' he knew 'twould be wormwood to both of us to have him do
just what he done."

Tenney laughed, a little bitter note. Tira could not remember ever
having heard him laugh with an unstinted mirth. At first, when he came
courting her, he was too worn with the years of work that had brought
him to her, and after that too wild with the misery of revolt. She was
sorry for that, with an increasing sorrow. Tira could bear no
unhappiness but her own.

"Wormwood!" he repeated, as if the word struck him curiously. "D'he
think 'twas goin' to be wormwood for a woman to find a man comin' all
fixed up like courtin' time, to steal a minute's talk? You make me
laugh."

He did laugh, and the laugh, though it might have frightened her, made
her the more sorry. She had the sense of keeping her hand on him, of
holding him back from some rushing course that would be his own
destruction.

"Yes," she answered steadily. "'Twould be nothin' but wormwood for me,
an' well he knows it. He don't--love me, Isr'el."

She hesitated before the word, and with it the thought of Raven came to
her, as she saw him, unvaryingly kind and standing for quiet, steadfast
things. "He hates me."

"Hates ye," he repeated curiously. "What's he hate ye for?"

"Because," said Tira, bound to keep quietly on in this new way of reason
with him, "I left him. An' I left him 'fore he got tired o' me. He
never'd overlook that."

"You left him, did ye?" he repeated. "Then that proves you was with him,
or ye couldn't ha' left him."

"Why, Isr'el," said she, her clear gaze on his turbid answering one, "I
told you. I told you long 'fore you married me. First time you ever
mentioned it, I told you, so's to have things fair an' square. I told
you, Isr'el."

He said nothing, but she knew the answer at the back of his mind, and it
seemed to her wise now to provoke it, to dare the accusation and meet
it, not as she always had, by silence, but a passionate testimony.

"You said," she continued, "it shouldn't make no difference, what I'd
don