side. One would have said the woodbine, looking in, had, in a mad,
irritating way, made itself the reflex of these human emotions within
the room. Tenney spoke, drily yet without emphasis:

"Then he put ye up to this?"

"Who?" asked Nan.

For some obscure reason he would not mention Raven's name. But he spoke
with a mildness of courtesy surprising to her and evidently the more
alarming to Tira, for she shook the more and the vine appallingly knew
and kept her company.

"I'm obleeged to ye," said Tenney. "But I don't want nothin' done for me
nor mine. He's mine, ye see. He's in there asleep"--he pointed to the
open bedroom door--"an' asleep or awake, he's mine, same's any man's
property is his. An' if he ain't right, he ain't, an' I know why, an'
it's the will o' the Lord, an' the Lord's will is goin' to be fulfilled
now an' forever after, amen!"

The tang of scripture phrasing led him further to the channel his mind
was always fumbling for.

"Do you," he asked Nan, not with any great show of fervor, but as if
this were his appointed task, "do you believe on the Lord Jesus Christ
yet? Be ye saved?"

"Mr. Tenney," said Nan, "I don't care a scrap whether I'm saved or not,
if I can make this world swing a little easier on its hinges." That
seemed to her a figure not markedly vivid, and she continued. "It needs
a sight of oiling. Don't you see it does? O, Mr. Tenney, think of the
poor little boy that's got to live along"--the one phrase still seemed
to her the best--"not right, and grow to be a man, and you may die and
leave him, and his mother may die. What's he going to do then?"

"No," said Tenney quietly, with the slightest glance at Tira in her
tremor there by the door, "I ain't goin' to die, not this v'y'ge. If
anybody's goin' to, it ain't me."

"O Isr'el!" said Tira. Her voice rose scarcely above a whisper and she
bent toward him in a beseeching way as if she might, in another instant,
run to him. "You let him go. You an' me'll stay here together, long as
we live. There sha'n't nothin' come betwixt us, Isr'el." In this Nan
heard a hidden anguish of avowal. "But you let him go."

Tenney did not regard her. He spoke, pointedly to Nan:

"I'm obleeged to ye." He rose from his chair. He was dismissing her. His
action approached a dignity not to be ignored, and Nan also rose.

"I sha'n't give it up," she said. "I shall come again."

She tried to smile at him with composure, including Tira in the
friendliness