forgot when we spoke so to
each other as we did a minute ago."

She waited, and he looked up at her, and the hunger of his eyes was as
moving to her as if, like the child they had fought over, he was himself
a child and "not right."

"We forgot," she said, in a soft shyness at having to remind him who was
a professing Christian of what he knew far better than she, "Who was
with us all the time: the Lord Jesus Christ."

She turned away from him, in a continued timidity at seeming to preach
to him, and seated herself again by the other window. The newspaper
clipping arrested her eye. She took it up, read it over slowly, read it
again and Tenney watched her. Then she crumpled it in her hand and
tossed it on the table. She glanced across at Tenney and spoke gravely,
threading her needle with fingers that did not tremble.

"That's jest like him," she said. "Anybody 't knew him 'd know 'twas
what he'd do. He's hand in glove with Edson that carries on that paper.
They go to horse-trots together. He's willin' to call attention to
himself, black eye an' all, if he can call attention to somebody else,
same time. That's wormwood, too, Isr'el. We're the ones it's meant for,
you an' me."

XXXI

In a day or two Raven had convinced himself that Dick, firm-lipped,
self-controlled, as if he had set himself a task, did not mean to leave
him. Raven, half amused, half touched, accommodated his behavior to
their closer relation and waited for Dick to disclose himself. He would
have been light-heartedly glad of the boy's company if he had found no
strangeness in it, no purpose he could not, from point to point, divine.
Dick sent for more clothes, and a case came by post. He wrote in his
chamber, for an hour or two every morning, and after that, Raven became
conscious that the boy was keeping a watchful eye on him. If Raven went
up to the hut, Dick was sure to appear there, in ten minutes at the
most. Once, after a heavy snow, Raven had the wood road broken out, and
Dick looked on in a darkling conjecture. And when Raven, now even to
Jerry's wonder, proceeded to break from the hut to the back road, Dick
found it not only impossible to restrain himself but wise to speak. They
were standing by the hearth in the hut, after Raven had swept it and
laid a careful fire. He had worked with all possible haste, for he never
was there now without wondering whether she might come. He had been
resting in the certainty of Tenney's crippled s