s horrified, and more than
that, indubitably more, she was perplexed.

"Yes," she said, "he found it out. 'Course he found it out first thing,
'fore he dressed him even. I got up early an' made the fires. I've been
makin' 'em sence he's laid up. So I don't know no more'n the dead how he
looked when it first come over him the crutch wa'n't there. But he come
out int' the kitchen--I'd been t' the barn then an' give the cows some
fodder--an' he carried a cane, his gran'ther's it was, same's the
crutch. It's got a crook handle, an' I've kep' it in the chimney corner
to pull down boxes an' things from the upper cupboard. An' he went out
to the barn an' come in an' eat his breakfast, an' eat his dinner an'
his supper, when they come round, an' we done the barn work together,
an' he ain't mentioned the crutch from first to last."

"Well," said Raven, in a futile reassurance, "perhaps he thinks he's
left it somewhere, and if he doesn't particularly need it--Jerry told me
only this morning the doctor said he might as well be getting used to a
cane."

"No," said Tira conclusively, "he don't think he's left it anywheres.
He's keepin' still, that's all."

Immediately Raven saw the menacing significance of Tenney's keeping
still. His mind ran with a quick foot over the imprisonment of the two
there together. Was there a moment, he wondered, when the suffering
brute was not threatening to her, when her heart could rest itself for
the next hurried flight? He ventured his question.

"Has he been"--he hesitated for a word and found what sounded to him a
mawkish one--"good to you at all, these last weeks?"

Tira reflected a moment and then, for the first time since she came in
from the cold, the blood rushed to her haggard cheeks. She remembered a
moment, the day before the burning of the crutch, when he had found her
doing her hair before the bedroom glass and had caught her to him
wildly. She had put him away from her, though gently, because his
violence, whether it took the form of starved passion or raging hate,
always seemed to her the unbecoming riot of a forward child, and he had
left her in a shamefaced anger, a grumbling attempt to recover his lost
dignity. Tira hid even from herself the miserable secrets of marital
savagery. No sacrifice was too great to hide from Tenney her knowledge
of his abasement. Most of all must she hide it from another man, and
that man Raven. Her answer was not ready, but she had it for him, and