all in?"

Dick was straight.

"I'll do my best," he said. "But a woman--like that--and you meeting her
as you did! It's not like you, Jack. You never'd have done such a thing
in all your born days if you weren't so rattled."

There were arguments at the back of his mind he could not, in decency,
use. He remembered Raven's look when he drew her in, and the tragic one
that mirrored it: passionate entreaty on the woman's face, on the man's
passionate welcome. As usual, it was the real witnesses of life standing
dumb in the background that alone had the power to convict. But they
could not be brought into court. Custom forbade it, the code between man
and man. Yet there they were, all the same.

"Well!" said Raven. He had responded with only a little whimsical lift
of the eyebrows to this last. "If you won't trust me, I must you. That's
all there is about it. The woman is our neighbor. Israel Tenney's wife,
and she's in danger of her life from her husband, and she won't leave
him."

Dick stared as at the last thing he had expected. He shook his head.

"Too thin," he said. "I've seen Tenney and I've heard him spoken of.
He's a psalm-singing Methody, or something of that sort. Why, I met him
one day, Jerry and I, and he stared at me as if he wanted to know me
again. And Jerry said afterward he was probably going to ask me if I'd
found the Lord; but he changed his mind or something. No, Jack, don't
you be taken in. That woman's pulling your leg."

"Dick," said Raven, "I've been told you have a very vivid sense of drama
in your narrative verse. You couldn't, by any possibility, apply it to
real life?"

"Oh, I know," said Dick, "New England's chock full of tragedy. But I
tell you I've seen Tenney. He's only a kind of a Praise-God Barebones.
Put him back a few hundred years, and you'd see him sailing for
Plymouth, for freedom to worship God. (Obstinate, too, like the rest of
'em. He wouldn't worship anybody else's God, only the one he'd set up
for himself.) If his wife didn't mind him, he might pray with her or
growl over the dinner table, but he wouldn't bash her head in.
Understand, Jack, I've seen Tenney."

"Yes," said Raven drily, "I've seen Tenney, too. And seen him in action.
Now, Dickie, you put away your man-of-the-world attitude toward battle,
murder, and sudden death, and you let me tell you a few things about
Tenney."

He began with the day when he had found Tira in the woods. He touched on
the facts brie